An interview with Tan Lin

Published in 2010 in the Wesleyan University Press poetry series, Tan Lin’s Seven Controlled Vocabularies defies generic categorization. Lin redefines “the book” for our cultural moment of networked communications, new technologies that threaten — or promise, depending on one’s point of view — to render obsolete many longstanding assumptions about our reading practices. In the following interview, Lin provides extensive commentary that becomes a textual extension of Seven Controlled Vocabularies. Generating multiple categorizations of this particular work, he simultaneously sets forth a series of provocative assertions that tend to dissolve “the book” into “reading and its objects”; “information linked to other information”; “a massive act of self-plagiarization”; “writing as metadata container”; “a geography of a publishing landscape”; “a timed function of simultaneous and delayed reading events in your life”; “the environment of the reading system”; “data to be edited, organized, tagged, reformulated, republished, blurbed, annotated, indexed, resold.” Filling in some of the background to his interest in controlled vocabularies and metadata, Lin reviews the composition and publishing history of Seven Controlled Vocabularies. Among other topics, he also discusses the book’s design elements, including the relationship between text and image; how his work differs from surrealism; the role of affect; and what he calls “the ambience of reading.”

The interview was conducted via email over several weeks during March and April 2010 by Chris Alexander, Kristen Gallagher, Danny Snelson, and Gordon Tapper. A final question by Asher Penn, appended to the end of the interview, addresses the Edit: Processing Writing Technologies event organized by Danny Snelson, which was held at University of Pennsylvania’s Kelly Writers House on April 21, 2010. — Gordon Tapper

Chris Alexander: I want to pose a genealogical question of sorts. From the early nineties to the present, we’ve seen vast changes in global “conditions of production” and communication. Although the American conversation tends to separate these spheres, it’s true that in both labor and social practice (whatever that is) networked communications technologies stand out as the signal difference. So in the industrial sector, we have Toyotization and the rise of “productive communication” models that institute continuous interaction between production and consumption (cf. Coriot, Hardt and Negri) with similar models taking hold in the service sector (point-of-service software, rfid, fleet management services or, for the professoriate, the rise of the assessment regime with its emphasis on “outcomes” assessment and student consumer feedback). In terms of social practice, we have an intensification of contact through networked technologies leading to faster and more mobile feedback loops — email to text messaging etc. — which, as Kittler would say, is not a matter of more and faster communication between persons but a proliferation of global links between computers, “necessarily leading to masses of words.” Here’s my question: What constitutes “the literary work” under these conditions? I’m thinking particularly here of your presence on Blogspot (and Tumblr), where, if I’m not mistaken, material from both Heath/Plagiarism and Seven Controlled Vocabularies (7CV) exists in an alternate state, and also your use of publish-on-demand services like Lulu.com, thru which you generated an early edition (variant? pre-release? working copy?) of 7CV. And more recently, thru the agency of Wesleyan University Press, this:

Starting TODAY —Daily RSS feeds of pages from Tan Lin’s new poetry book, “SevenControlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking:[AIRPORT NOVEL MUSICAL POEM PAINTING THEORY FILM PHOTO HALLUCINATION LANDSCAPE].” New pages will be posted daily thru April 19th, and may be viewed or downloaded.

Since the overall paradigm suggests a bi- or multidirectional flow of information and materials, I could ask the question the other way, noting the inclusion of “plagiarized,” “disposable,” or “ambient” materials in 7CV. Is the concept of a “book” or a “work” still operant in 7CV? If so, how does that concept differ from the book as it would have existed circa 1989?

Tan Lin: As a general examination of different reading practices, 7CV is book as controlled vocabulary system, mathematical structure, engineering project, and bibliographic “collection” whose general subject is reading and its objects, where an “object” may denote a book, a table, a recipe, a teapot, Jacques Tati, CD, map, index, etc. It’s relaxed reading in that sense. Likewise, we read a title or caption or front cover differently than we read the “interior” of a book. We “read” a novel differently than we read a cookbook, and more specifically, a recipe in a cookbook, and I wanted to suggest that maybe we could read a novel like recipes in a cookbook or an episode of a reality TV series, or a controlled vocabulary system, or a restaurant review on Yelp. I mean cookbooks almost always have pictures of food in them, so why shouldn’t a poetry book, which traffics in imagery, have photos of books in it, like a kind of self-reproducing floralegia or plant? There are a lot of vestigial organicist metaphors in the book! In 7CV printed matter (both text and image) has been captured/reproduced in numerous ways, with CCD (flatbed) scanning, digital photography of printed book pages, retyping of printed matter, reading and re-reading, bibliographic citation, footnoting, indexing, and self-plagiarism of earlier sources. Machine reading involves parsing alpha numeric systems and metadata layers, OCR technology, word processing, data tagging, etc. 7CV is a massive act of self plagiarism of the Lulu edition. Images have been enhanced and edited in Photoshop. Some material in 7CV is blogged or user-generated content. This material needs to be organized, which explains the controlled vocabulary system, which I suppose is the book itself as a generalized function of its own organizational, i.e. data structures. Google Books resituates a system of reading. It is not optimized for lengthy reading, scanning or copying. It is anti-novelistic in that sense, and favors short-form reading. It’s a reading system that makes owning the book irrelevant. Once a book is scanned into a database and cross-referenced with other titles, what does one have? Is it even a book? Or is it just information linked to other information? Reading a book today feels a lot like the latter to me, and 7CV reflects that migration.

Thus in 7CV, the concept of the book is mildly operant, but generally and among other functionally differentiated reading platforms, so the book is an image created by a controlled vocabulary system. What is a book? Something that categorizes and controls data and organizes specific reading formats i.e. the book is a generalized reading environment, what Luhmann terms a “loosely coupled medium,” coupled to various publishing mechanisms, printed and non-printed formats, people, metadata tags, wives, genres, TV, the “spectral” cinema, scanners, Chinese people, etc. One might call this “poetry,” but one could just as easily call it “literary studies,” “fiction,” “obit,” or “family.” So in 7CV you have various and conflictual reading practices across genres, regarded as social agreements, and hardware/software platforms, and a lot of this is not reading in the sense of what most people think about as “reading a book of literature by a poet in a book published by a university press.” There are visual images, metadata tags, bits of programming languages, bar codes, poems, subtitles, editorial notes, found photographs, postcards (from the Swiss Institute), advertisements, scanned images and printed book pages, annotations, typos, computer generated handwriting, text translations by Google Translate, and indexes, acknowledgments and forewords by other writers. Given this, what is peripheral in or to reading? A bar code? Chinese characters? The Wesleyan Poetry series? 7CV focuses on elements that codify reading in specific, rigid, and/or standardized ways. These processes are tied as much to publishing, marketing, distribution, layout, inclusion on syllabi, etc. as they are to writing or composing, which I think are relatively weak forms of “authorship” or text production. Hence my fondness for anecdotes, weak narratives, Library of Congress Classification (LCC), coursepacks, MS Word, and other digital media as they impact the book’s operations (versions, editions, RSS serialization, etc.) in a communication field.

7CV is a printed book, but it was/is also a pre- and post-publication RSS feed, PDF downloads of the first, unrevised edition on the Lulu site (now “direct access”), an animated version (executed in Director and streamed from the Penn site as a Flash video) of the first chapter available on the PennSound site (Eleven Minute Painting) and as a stand-alone video. There will, I hope, be a series of revisions to the text as post-publication RSS feeds, correcting and altering what will officially appear, on April 1, 2010. So the book, like all books really, exists in multiple states of revision/publication; this interview is inseparable from its overall publication history: reception within an academic setting and within a number of online poetry publications/forums. I am planning a dual-language edition of the book, in English and Chinese, and this in turn will be translated back into English. A new cover has been designed. A book of blurbs about the book will appear as a separate publication, which is really an extension of the present publication. Some unattributed blurbs are on the Amazon web site. The book will be reeditioned at Edit, an event curated by Danny Snelson. Finally, I am assembling an online appendix that will include such things as high school yearbook items, dental X-rays, drug prescriptions, and other fleeting encounters with the book’s publishing history and the autobiographical. At any rate, the book as storage/distribution/composition/publication medium is a little hard to pin down; this is not surprising: people generally store things in a host of different places/sites, and this applies to the digital world — so why not with reading/composing/publishing, which is highly ephemeral as a practice, and where boundaries between the three are considerably blurred in a digital environment. It used to be that publishing was seen to stabilize what de Certeau notes as the highly ephemeral practices of reading, which I think of as a form of forgetting, but publishing is now, in some ways, just as transitory as the act of composition or reading, where reading is a leftover procedure.

Of course printed photos and hard copy books are defined by contexts and notes on those contexts: handwritten annotations in book pages or backs of photos, appended dates, highlighting or penciling, post-its, etc. These occur in a digital environment. The “2004” in the title is a “handwritten” notation inserted into a title, and the book’s use of photographs is consonant with changes in photo sharing sites etc., and thus the contours of memory. Some of the photos look accidental, dated, possibly corrupted. There are tons of nearly identical or generic digital photos on Flickr, a site whose photo archives are marked by nominal editing or pruning of large photo collections, minimal metadata, reduced resolution, and, in general, personal text/image archives that are not looked at very often or are not perceived to have life expectancies greater than the person who generated them. This is also true of people’s photo albums, but now access to other peoples’ albums has increased exponentially. We inhabit the era of the short archive, and this suits me as a specific kind of reader: a reader with a bad memory. 7CV is no less autobiographical in a generic, unedited, ephemeral way, where the “identity” of a person or file sharing system is not fixed but context sensitive e.g. multiple identifiers or tags exist for a “singular” object. This mirrors the increasing segmentation and interactivity within a socially networked environment, i.e. multiple email addresses, social network profiles, versions or copy states of document changes, status updates, etc. Finally, 7CV raises issues common to personal archives and libraries trying to organize, store and access large amounts of mixed material. How are photos searched, indexed, or identified in 7CV? How are specific photos brought into relation to specific text elements? Typically texts and images are parsed differently, using either text or image attributes. There seems to be very shallow parsing taking place. How are things, like memories or images of loved ones, saved and in how many formats? How are changes in copies and lineage noted in metadata layers? A number of the book’s prefaces recycle content from earlier prefaces, and the book as a whole makes use of appropriated materials, much as a human life does. Is 7CV edited? If so, by whom? Is it a scrapbook? Does it have a narrative or history or dissemination logic? Does it embody what libraries term LOCKSS (lots of copies keeps stuff safe)? Of course, 7CV is notable for absences, typos, memory lapses, errors, TV formats. There are clearly voice and data holes: most notably, where is the “China — Poetry” of the first LC subject heading? To get some of this book you have to go outside it, to other web sites, films, etc. How can these things, not unlike memories, be located again?

Metadata tags can be embedded in more than one way (e.g. in web pages, within files), or externalized (card catalogs, databases, online table of contents, concordances, etc.). This raises issues about the relation between so-called content and its “essence,” or content and various descriptive systems, all of which involve reading of one sort or another, or as you say the displacement of a book beyond its physical location, but of course a metadata tag has a particular site of inscription, and I was interested in the materialities of various reading formats where the distinction between formal and forensic materiality, as Matthew Kirschenbaum has pointed out, is operant. Or to put it otherwise, metadata is always incomplete i.e. context sensitive. Which of the two or multiple locations — content versus essence — is the more “permanent,” or “unchanging/eternal,” and how are errors detected in metadata systems more generally as they reflect or reference “objects?” There are a lot of typos in 7CV! Are these missing objects or subjects? And what is the status of captions in the book, in relation to text blocks, images, and metadata tags? Is the book self-describing and how does it reference its migration across platforms? A web copy of an “object” might look the same as the object but it usually has different resolutions, is augmented with additional information etc. One might say the same of 7CV.

For no real or pre-mediated reason, the book had various “published,” self-published and distributed states/files. It was written in MSWord in 2003, accepted for publication (2004) with a small press but did not appear until 12/2005 as a Lulu self-published paperback ($12.95) and PDF download. It was revised 2008–2009 for Wesleyan University Press, with new cover, publishing data, and addition/excision of numerous photos, tags, and captions, and revisions to Systems Theory. Much of the Lulu data is unchanged and many self-publishing (author-as-seller) elements surface in the Wesleyan University Press editions/RSS feeds. The physical front and back covers were altered — i.e. it has become a legal format, which includes a machine-readable bar code, Library of Congress Control Number (LCCN), ISBN, dated (archived) Wesleyan University Press logo, Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), “handwritten” (using MS Word’s drawing function) title that differs from the “title” of the Lulu edition (which strictly speaking didn’t have a front cover title), subtitles that are a meta tag of the book’s contents (in lieu of a table of contents), and a record of licensing/copyright arrangements. So the framing of the book is very different. Mainly, it has metadata layers for bibliographic control. The LCSH is an old-fashioned thesaurus, and 7CV references dictionaries and other classification/reading systems. Subject headings are conflict-prone near ethnicity/identity issues, and I tried to highlight that with “China-Poetry” as a disappearing first term. The cinema section was revised with Portable Network Graphics instructions. PNG is a format for bitmapped images. Like a GIF, it utilizes lossless data compression but is license free (Unisys). But the main change involves the title. The Lulu book didn’t have a functioning title and functioning bar code, only a symbolic one. It floated into a reading space more readily. But what would it mean, really, for a book to have a non-functioning bar code in a self-published book? The entire Wesleyan University Press front cover (physical back cover) and back cover area is a controlled vocabulary system; it alludes to a host of other title/author systems, including Laura Riding Jackson’s Rational Meaning, and Irma S. Rombauer, et al. i.e. The Joy of Cooking. Authors are joined to printed matter by publishing. Why give it three titles or the semblance of three titles? Perhaps to maximize hits and links on Google. The book is a geography of a publishing landscape: what is that landscape? Something like the statistical vocabulary field that Claude Shannon called Printed English.

Kristen Gallagher: I know from hearing you talk, and also from your last few books, that you’re interested in ephemeral language and use it to generate writing. For example, more recently we’ve had the experience (which is a clear concern of yours in Heath) of all the kinds of writing happening on the web, which I suspect many people don’t yet think of as writing, like product reviews or little spur of the moment notes to friends that then some other person copies onto their blog or cuts and pastes into a poetry project, bits of text that are probably the most common form of writing happening now. 7CV seems to be constructed entirely out of that, though I think a good bit of it is not from the web, but instead I imagine it being from brochures, reviews, little product labels and tags. I sense that some of the images in the book are among your sources, whether a painting you’ve used for description, a used postcard, or a little slip of paper like a receipt that is mostly flooded with product codes one wouldn’t even know how to decipher. I especially like how the numbers from these kinds of codes seem to get recycled into your text. There’s something pleasurable about knowing that these things I’m reading might be from this kind of ephemera. A poorly paid cashier mechanically hands over this odd slip of paper full of numbers and says “have a nice day.” You’ve put it in the book and in reading it my brain is having a response like “things as they are are really part of the world and I forgot.” How nice to just feel them roll over the brain! It’s like a brain massage!

As I read 7CV I keep thinking, in terms of your writing process, of that old surrealist strategy/game “Directions for Use” where a source text — the directions for anything from how to open champagne, to how to take your Prozac, to how to put out a fire with baking soda — gets remixed with words and phrases from whatever big metaphysical concept the writer chooses — like death, the universe, love, whatever. The results can be both/either nonsensical and revelatory. Your process seems similar in 7CV, though your process and source texts yield greater complexity than the results typically found in “directions for use” because, first of all, you’re mixing more types of source text — lots of ephemeral language and coding get mixed with discussions of painting, writing, architecture, falling in love, memory (which are all also codes and this book consistently makes that a pleasurable revelation) — and second of all, because those kinds of source texts when mixed as you mix them begin to suggest theories of art, writing, and space emerging through a consideration of ephemera. I know from the title that you are thinking through “controlled vocabularies” — the language of indexing and categorizing in the first place. Readers know you’re thinking through these categories of writing, painting, architecture, etc., yet as in surrealist texts, I suspect that we should not read too closely, too intensely. It’s not Adorno! You could just as well ignore what it “means.” It is both serious and light, not only sensitive, beautiful, but nonsensical at the same time. I’d like you to talk about this effect but I’d also like to hear about the process of your writing 7CV. For example, did you plan this project or did it emerge out of play? Were the poems written over a long period as you found good ephemera, or were they written after a period of purposeful collecting? Were there specific source texts that appealed to you in terms of conceiving the project as a relaxed theorizing of aesthetic categories and everyday life/objects/writing? Did you think of surrealist writing strategy as you were writing this book? I feel like I’m seeing little signs of surrealism everywhere here.

Lin: Breton’s Nadja has been hugely important for 7CV and even more so for the novel I’ve recently finished, Our Feelings Were Made by Hand. 7CV was written in 2002, rather quickly, like almost all of my books, and I had been reading and teaching Breton and Ernst’s overpaintings and frottages. Generally, and I don’t know why this is so, I write books in a three- or four-month period, then spend years “repairing” them. I think this perhaps has to do with a certain impatience followed by obsessiveness with one form, but it is also directly related to publication history. This was true of Lotion Bullwhip Giraffe and BlipSoak01, and Heath, and now 7CV, which is earlier than Heath, as it was written in 2002–03. Like all those books, 7CV is written under a formal system, in which I make certain personal and mostly informal notations or emendations. Here I think the work diverges from the avant-garde or neo-avant-garde in that it dispenses with more strict notions of aesthetic autonomy; I think that it is simply not reflective of the alterations that individuals make over time, here the time of revision, to the structures of everyday life. But unlike de Certeau, I do not think this originates in the unconscious as something distinct from the conscious.

For me, Breton’s Nadja is a theory about, to rephrase T. S. Eliot, the use and generation of poetic materials. In it, Nadja the character, whatever in the end she may be, floats through the structure or apparatus of a novel as if she doesn’t really belong there, i.e. she is something of a cinematic image superimposed upon a novel or text. Breton makes the repeated point that he meets her unexpectedly and randomly in the course of his wanderings/writings. Who is Nadja? She may have been a real-life prostitute that Breton befriended. Or not. She is a visual effect in a novel, an objet trouvé, an analogue for objective chance, a staged function of the novel’s ability to punctuate certain “realist” landscapes — Parisian cafés, streets and storefronts — with something ineffable. Like an image in a mirror — and more importantly for Breton and Dali — in celluloid, she is real and unreal. In such a world it is hard tell which is more real, the mundane settings or the magical (cinematic) appearance/apparatus of Nadja. The reader has trouble differentiating between descriptions of Nadja and what was only her effect. In the end Nadja is the apparatus of the novel and of its writing, a novel or a character that one can no longer term a narrative, at least in the conventional novelistic sense. She evinces what Werner Spies terms “new modalities of narration” but it might be simpler to say that she is not really in herself visible except as the means by which the text is held together — men with beards, clumsy waiters, cafés, signs, illuminated windows, etc. Amidst urban emptiness and a host of aura-less items, Nadja endows the scene with the marvelous. She makes the random disjecta membra of contemporary life — evinced most clearly in the desultory photos that populate the work — seem connected and meaningful. The mundane photographs of Paris are not mere photochemical traces (lost love) of the real world but sites through which something marvelous had once passed. Nadja is thus a haunting of the “real” or objective and ordinary world by unpredictable and unconscious desires, an example of convulsive beauty. One could say that the idea or system of poetry functions like Nadja in 7CV, its own blind spot, nowhere to be found, hallucinated everywhere, and linked to haptic writing procedures! Breton poses the question: could chance be said to humanize the individual and make her life distinctly her own, as textual production? For Breton the answer I think would be yes. But I’d probably say no. And the poetry, if it is visible, is not convulsive.

Thus the emphasis on a psychic system linked to the ineffable or the unconscious is something I tried to avoid. 7CV is writing as metadata container. I was not interested in chance encounters, and anyway I read Breton’s encounters with Nadja as anything but random; they are dictated by the psychic apparatuses (Freud’s omnipotence of thought) responsible for the work itself, and also, by extension, the narrator’s bivalent identity (lover/father/friend). With regards Breton, the novel plays the analogous fiction/nonfiction line. So, I do not pretend there is a difference between poetry and everything else, or that a metadata tag/caption or eruption of an anecdote is prompted by unconscious desire — it is already written into the literary system! It is the opposite of surprising. I mean it is a dead space in the text, something that will not be processed as part of a conscious reading process or related consciously to the narrative content of the section at hand. One skips over it. The stories that I tell are a bit inert, inconsequential, minor, absorbed more or less by the everyday structures of reading and generic spaces of the city. It doesn’t really matter if they happen to me or to you, the reader — these are the same functions of text. I am no more individual or responsible or emotionally captivating than you, the reader, are. In most blog writing “you” = “me.” Most of our reading spaces today are dead or interchangeable, what Koolhaas terms junk spaces, generic spaces, what I call controlled vocabulary systems etc., linked in a larger system of meaning production. The book reflects this communication: modular, schematic and blandly visual in its presentation of textual and visual matter as a single operation, and its layout encourages scanning rather than continuous reading for plot. In other words, reading is a coherent, self-contained, mechanical process, a conceptual armature, and all visualizations of identity produced within it are illusions of identity. How does a “narrator” appear in 7CV? There are no photos of me in 7CV. There are quite a few “other” authors. Different reading systems within the book produce different authors/individuals. Who am I? A shadow of an apparatus, a necessary illusion inserted after the mechanics of reading. Why does one or a few subjects appear? In order to assure the system that something registers in the meaning that has already transpired. I think it is also important to keep in mind that issues of identity are being linked to online reading practices, where there is a notable drop off in retention and comprehension, mainly because the movement of material into working memory and then into long term memory is harder to facilitate with rapid skimming of material. And yet this is the way we read.

Thus scenes and photos (they are the same) in 7CV are from other sources, but the narrator has tried to inhabit, weakly, these scenarios, genres of writing and formats of reading: how would one go about living in or imagining oneself in an article about smart mobs from Salon, or a restaurant review of WD50 on Yelp, or an academic book on the economic implications of WalMart? I get involved in these kinds of reading materials all the time. I mean I read a huge amount of minor, anecdotal, and fluff journalism ALL the time. I love reading the Post and the Daily News. Are they lousy papers? Well, maybe, but I certainly enjoy reading them. I could spend the day reading the wedding pages, restaurant reviews and obits. The above genres can be lived in, not only as a writer but also a reader, and this is suggestive of and ushers from the vast amounts of user-generated content and the blurring of the writing/reading boundary in web-based and social networking sites. Is one writing or reading? It’s kind of hard to tell. So 7CV reflects this prevailing read/write mode in our contemporary moment. Is this surreal? Is it surreal how we read newspapers today on the web? I don’t think so. I think it is just the way most people read online, by half participating in our own vaguely spectatorial reading practices. There is no need to convert my psyche into Nadja or something that it is not. Most of our reading spaces like our lives are shallow and I see no reason to create a deep space known as the novel. I mean the minute I read a story or start a novel if it smells like fiction I immediately put it down. I’ve been doing this since I was a teenager so you can imagine how many books I’ve done this to. Most people on the planet do not write lengthy novels. They are more likely to write themselves in a restaurant review or note to a loved on, or some other short form mode of writing like a text message. These formats for writing constitute a way of living inside one’s own life, they are the reading formats we actually live our lives in. So 7CV is really about not some magical moment of textual crystallization or surrealist frisson; it is about the banality and ordinariness that inheres in our read/write lives. I wrote most of the book in that manner. I tried to entertain myself. I lied. I told the truth a little. I chose things from the newspaper that pleased me and inserted myself into my reading of them. Isn’t this really what most of us do when reading or participating in reading? It’s a low-grade pleasure. It’s easy. I tell my students this all the time, reading is easy, just like watching TV. So is writing. And now, thanks to the Internet, so is publishing.

Gallagher: I’m curious if you could more directly address some of the recognizable numeric codes in the book. There are a lot of numbers in 7CV. And heck, at your instigation, Tan, we keep referring to it as 7CV, a kind of conversion of title into a numeric code. There are also a lot of barcodes from the back of objects scanned into in 7CV as images. You’re talking about genre as code, about affects as results of engaging particular codes, but when I see barcodes I also think of tracking. Many people have a Foucauldian reading of the barcode as the ultimate surveillance technique. How do you feel about that? And in terms of your interest in kinds of reading — relaxed, half-attentive, scanning — I am also compelled to note that barcodes are “read” and “scanned” though in a much more purely machinic sense. Are you trying to get at something about machinic reading/writing?

Lin: I was interested in reading as a function of various and measured efficiencies. We think of reading in terms of what it gives us, i.e. content, but I was interested in speeds of reading regarded as information delivery. The title of the book is unwieldy and so an abbreviation, as you’ve noted, is necessary to reference the book. The bar code is one way to process, i.e. read, data efficiently, but so is a LC subject heading, or the ISBN number, which is, in turn, converted into two barcodes on the book’s back cover, one indicating book/publisher information and the second five-digit code indicating currency and pricing data. The UPC code, used for groceries, was first used at Kroger in Cincinnati, Ohio. Kroger was where our family did most of our grocery shopping when I was growing up, so I have a fondness for barcode history, southeastern Ohio, and buying charcoal briquettes and city chicken at Kroger! Buying groceries felt very American when my family came to the US from China in the late 1950s. I don’t think my parents went to huge grocery stores until they moved to Athens, Ohio in 1959, where my father was offered a job teaching ceramics. At any rate, barcode symbols probably outnumber all other symbols in the book, and they have a weak autobiographical function with the book’s historical time frame. Barcodes are standardized. Wesleyan University Press, for example, gives up a dollar for each book sold, if the bar code in question is improperly placed or sized, and thereby creates an error reading at the cash register. So barcodes are a fitting symbol for 7CV; I like it when reading has a definite structure or time frame to it. They decorate the reading and they are the reading.

Barcodes are data instantiated as image, one that can be read quickly, efficiently, with little chance of error by any number of optical scanners or readers. 7CV reflects reading in the sense of highly efficient, fast, universal, and, well, superficial readings. Thus the references to times of reading and George Muller’s theories in the painting section, a section which is filled with seasonal and temporal references and rondelays, along with a missing series of paintings. The paintings have been erased because the mass-produced book, historically, is not very good at reproducing images, and is incapable of producing moving images. When I want to see images, I go to a website. Books have been supplanted, recently, by cinema and television and the Internet, and the painting section makes a vague historical reference to something executed in Director: a multimedia authoring platform “built on a movie metaphor.” So what is presented is not a film but an animation in language, which is what all text becomes when you read it. Macromedia was acquired by Adobe in 2005, and Director is now, like painting, an anachronism, having been eclipsed by After Effects. So there are different kinds of images and image production. The last section of American Painting is about different kinds of images in a homogeneous space, and this brings us to poetry, which is a medium traditionally used for the production and reproduction of images. Poetry is intertwined with other arts, including drama and prose poetry, theories of poetry (poesis) and now digital poetry. 7CV was born digital: written in MS Word, laid out in Quark and InDesign, retouched in Photoshop, photographed with a Nikon digital and a flatbed scanner. These strands constitute a complex composite image, but it might be called an alphanumeric text, or digital object with a license.

In plate 12, historical/temporal sequences are off amidst multiple media references: it is summer but it’s snowing; I am making a TV set (or myself into a TV set) while waiting for dinner guests. There is much inexactitude when making dinner for guests and wondering when they are going to walk through a door! Making oneself into a medium like television, well, that’s also unpredictable. In the end, it’s hard to tell when this is taking place but none of this matters in the frame or sequencing of the book, which sends out data regularly and in a relaxed and modular fashion. This is post-broadcast era, maybe it’s narrowcasting or a TIVO distribution model. What does one do with information that is just information? One takes it in. Ditto with reading. I don’t have to understand to be able to read the things I am reading. In fact, I like to read fast and make lots of mistakes while scanning material. One can do anything once one gets into or inside a book; in this sense it’s like watching television. One makes up most of what one sees. Part of the reason for photographing the backs of books is that that is where most barcodes are found, and back covers are more likely to be ignored, though Wesleyan University Press and Amazon reproduced the back cover even though text on both front and back covers is too small to be read in most online images.

Gordon Tapper: Following up on what you said about the front and back covers, I’d like you to talk more about the book design of 7CV and its connection to the multitude of framing devices that suffuse the book from start to finish. In the fourth section of the book, “2 Identical Novels,” we find one of many prescriptive declarations that function simultaneously as descriptions of the book: “literature like everything else should just be a form of packaging” (102). Of course, two of the most noticeable instances of this packaging are the very playful front and back covers. The title and author are, as usual, printed on the front cover, but the typeface is so small that most readers will have to squint, and the first thing most readers will notice is what appears to be the cataloguing information that customarily appears on the copyright page, complete with ISBN numbers, Library of Congress subject headings, and the library call number. We have in a sense been programmed to recognize the visual format of this cataloguing information, but if we take the time to actually read the subject headings, we will realize that these categories have not been generated by the Library of Congress, but have been invented by the author. Yet it would be wrong to call these categories imaginary or completely ironic, since they in fact amount to a more or less accurate summation of 7CV. We will encounter discourse on “mass media and language,” anecdotes about “wives — familial relationships,” and references to the ethnic content implied by the first subject heading, “China — poetry.” Why did you appropriate and distort this utilitarian form, drawn from the realm of what was once quaintly known as “library science,” to frame our reading of the book? How does this opening gesture live up to the idea that literature is “just” a form of packaging?

Lin: The cover was designed to be read. Paradoxically, most book covers are graphic, i.e. have visual oomph because they are the front door announcing content “inside.” But I didn’t want the title to be graphic, a sign outside the book. I wanted the sign to be inside the book pointing out to things that are not in the book, so the inside is more graphic than the physical back cover, which is the book’s conceptual front cover. The book interior points lackadaisically to itself, like the grid of Manhattan. We tried to make the covers not pretty or graphic, and inefficient at rapidly communicating the book’s idea. It is a poor cover. It is in my good friend Charles’s words, “non-absorptive.” By making the print, in Scala Sans, tiny, you force people (people are designed by reading practices) to turn the cover into something that isn’t looked at — if you want to make sense of it you have to get out a magnifying glass and read it! And ditto with the hand-drawn title in on the physical back. The LC info is not something most readers read, but here it tells you, as you note, a lot. It functions in lieu of a table of contents, or it shades into that functionality. Needless to say the front cover is important to reading the particulars of this book. The LC matter may be more expressive, compositionally speaking, or just as expressive, bibliographically speaking, as anything else. Certainly it’s meant to be amusing and anecdotal, but that goes with the territory of subject headers, as any librarian can tell you. Subject headers are very biased! I wanted to address controversy as it relates to poetry and cooking. These do not seem separate categories. The cover is robin’s egg blue, which is spring like. It reminds me of Easter egg shells. I am not a practicing Christian but Easter is the most pleasing of religious holidays. It has not been utterly commodified except perhaps by the color of plastic eggs and the foils wrapped around chocolates. Easter eggs and Chinese fortune cookies go together in the book. Blue is a decorative fondant or confection! The cover is almost lickable.

The physical front matter contains the legal, registered title, whereas the physical back has the title in a hand drawn version done without the hand. It was done in MS Word, using a line draw software function and a mouse. Everything about a book is about its mediation. There is no packaging “for” a book. The book is its packaging, its system of reproduction, visualization, dissemination, etc. There is no inside/outside, paratext/text distinction. They are all integrated, like software, or micro-ideologies, in the book “proper.” The book is co-extensive with layout, editing, bibliography, and distribution. The book is a timed function of simultaneous and delayed reading events in your life. There are only two options: it can be read or it can be unread. You read and don’t read a book over generations or years and I wanted to position reading in this extended time frame by making it a fast read, almost non-reading. A controlled vocabulary system lets you in and out quickly. What is the difference between a reader and a design element? No difference. The book is (printed) in Scala Sans. The book was written on a PC but transferred to and laid out on a Mac. Scala Sans was one of the first fonts for the Mac. It was developed in 1988 in Holland, and released in the FontFont Library in 1993 in a sans serif version, one that included elements like small caps and ligatures, which were missing from the early Mac fonts. Scala Sans is used in the Chicago Manual of Style, so it seemed appropriate that it be used in 7CV, regarded as a field guide of reading as a series of highly punctuated/differentiated but regulated practices. These practices are all “codified” as the reading of a book. What is a book “title”? A title appears on the physical front and back covers of the book, on the half title and full title page. So you have four divergent titles, i.e. they serve different purposes in or on or around the book. A title can stop you from reading a book.

Tapper: Let’s zero in on how you incorporate visual images into 7CV. In almost every section, you conjoin image and text according to what starts out as a fairly consistent recto-verso scheme, with text on left, image on right, though in some sections the visual space of the page is organized into quadrants, with the text and image floating in and out of these four regions. Beyond this element of graphic design, however, I detect an engagement with some of the most ancient debates in poetics about the relationship between text and image, about how to define “the image,” and about whether painting or poetry possesses superior mimetic capacities, a theoretical question that has grown vastly more complex since the advent of photography, cinema, and digitized information. You play with the image-text relationship on a dizzying number of levels. For instance, in the first section of the book, you signal that images will be linked to the textual markers “Plate 1,” “Plate 2,” etc., only to leave blank the page where we expect to see an image. Then in the second section, our expectations for images are satisfied, but now the Plate number markers appear on the verso page, above not an image, but a module of text that sometimes appears to refer obliquely to the image on the recto. In other cases, though, one can find hardly any reference at all to the images, which are hard to identify, though readers will probably infer a relationship because the structure of the book seems to demand it. In “A Field Guide to the American Landscape,” we encounter a rather lyrical statement that seems to guide us, as any good field guide should, as to how we should approach these enigmatic, always quirky, sometimes quite amusing images of things like the back of a package of moist towelettes: “If my eyes were like a newspaper, the photographs appear to revolve around the words like a series of imaginary facts” (48). In what sense can we conceive of the photos in 7CV as “imaginary facts,” whatever that oxymoron might mean? How does 7CV ask us to think about the relationship between image and text?

Lin: Well a number of things are at work. The most basic is that inserting photos in 7CV changes how it’s read. Eliminating images (or their mildly correspondent blank spaces with a text) would make reading more straightforward and linear, and for me, unrelenting. But it would have its payoff in increased retention. It is hard for me to read a book straight through, which is probably why I like Musil, Brautigan, Acker, Barthelme, or Alexander Kluge. These books kind of do my reading for me, and I feel no desire to finish them. The photos in 7CV are an aid to a reading of a more general kind, one grounded in skimming, skipping, leafing through, muteness, overlooking, thinking back about books one has read but doesn’t have anymore. Books seem to propagate themselves. Thus, the book has certain self-replicating structures within it. Like a scrapbook, it is comprised of almost personal photos and mildly irrelevant texts, reading headers, software, and places/blanks where images are statistically indicated by textual pointers or captions. This is not meant to be difficult or evasive. When one reads, one connects with the things one reads in a personal way. Otherwise, one would stop reading. And I stop reading a lot when I read. There is a lot of muteness and blindness in the text or reading system, the generic and in the controlled vocabulary system. So in contrast to this notion that in today’s environment nearly everything has an image or text posted to it, there is quite a bit of blank or mute space in 7CV, and so the interior of the book, fully administered and commodified by various systems of reading and textual production, has blanks, hypnagogic lulls, and spa-like areas where eyeballs might rest. I wanted the text to be relaxed, yogic, anecdotal, easily consumed. The self-reflexive images — mostly from the flea market — are vaguely generic and generically comforting! They don’t corroborate the text clearly; they remain loosely or generically relevant, like scaffolding to the reading processes and feelings that underlie or circulate in and through the reading system regarded in the most general of terms, as a medium that generates meanings of the most diffuse and pleasurable sorts and makes the reader possible. So the photos are the mood or environment for reading text, but the text is mood-based as well, and it’s hard to separate (reading) a book (or architecture or other non-printed forms of reading matter) from the ambience of reading. The book is just the environment of the reading system. There is really no such thing as a book from the perspective of a reading system, and 7CV is about this ambience or mood of reading, regarded as system. And it is mostly silent i.e. it is not a phonemic system (no slips of the tongue) but a statistical one marked by typos, stray punctuation, irregular type/fonts, graphic redundancies, etc. The first section exists as voice only to the extent that it is a computer-generated voice program named Dorothy. [Editor’s note: See Lin’s “Eleven Minute Painting” video, available at PennSound.]

Within this system, I relate to most of the photos in a distracted, personal way. I didn’t take most of them. This defines what Goffman calls rules of irrelevance. The photographs are almost textual in this reading space, and vice versa. There is no sequestration. In this sense, the book is a statistical landscape or minor encounter with text in general, what linguists terms “word shapes” as a medium for meaning, a quasi-architectural space, a generic feeling, an inner blank spot in a system of affects and photographs that might be affects. The landscape images, which mirror something once called subjectivity, are found photographs bought at the flea market, which I then either re-photographed digitally or scanned in to something that might once have been referred to as consciousness. And it’s strange about that consciousness but I think of those photos as mine. I remember them. I even remember having them, which happened when I re-photographed or scanned them. So the book is about reuse, remembering and re-remembering of imagery from other sources and people. Many stories are sampled with the narrator’s subjectivity interjected i.e. I like to read stories from the newspaper and then re-narrate them as if they had happened to me. This is self-reflexive, artificial and book like. The book is a strange interface between analog and digital, from painting and cinema and photography and architecture (and their notions of authorship) to new digital mediums associated with metadata containers, information architecture, and tags, which function as non-readable captions to text and images. The title’s “handwriting” is digital. A mode of remembering/reading/organizing/cataloging material is replaced by another. The reader is an internal self-condition of a reading system where it’s hard to distinguish between an image as a sign (to textual matter), a text that functions graphically as reading module, and a metadata tag that functions as a textual title, photographic caption. Like an embedded metadata tag, which are relevant less to content than its processing, the book is about things not seen, patterns of non-reading and non-retention, statistical systems of reading and memory rather than reading and memory “itself.” Guess work prevails, but 7CV is not a zero-order approximation. I cannot remember what the captions or some content signifies. Much has passed through me. Some of this lies in the historical field: the field guide concept has dates attached. The first Baedeker guides appear in 1839 and document visitations to the Rhine. There may be pictures of the Rhine in the book. Photographs were added to guidebooks at the same time, evinced in Daguerre and Fox Talbott’s production, in France and England, respectively, regarded as photographic countries. The anecdotal evidence collected in the Identical Novel section is textual and graphic in orientation, in its textual and extra-textual locations or shapes.

Because of its high redundancy and low poetry, 7CV may not be poetry at all. There is, however, parsing of things that might be poetic, like empty spaces in the cinema section. But these spaces are just typographic, the product of tab stops! This is a double-entry system of accounting. Information is getting lost. Accidents and typos are admitted from the get go. And the system can be seen “in” chapter divisions and paratextual divisions “in” the text, regarded as a sophisticated, self-organizing system. Where are these stories found? In what local structures (photographic close up) or patterns (macro view) are they momentarily glimpsed? This might have been contained in an (identical) novel once, but now it’s a database. The (identical) novel cannot imagine itself! This can only be done from the system of poetry! All we have are a bunch of pedagogical scenes: street scenes, classrooms, professors in classrooms, landscapes, photographs, textual matter — regarded as a bildungsroman. At some points one thinks one can “see” a story, a recognition scene that Aristotle termed anagnorisis, but which is a highly temporalized phenomenon and mostly just an anonymous murmur: it is a function of a self-organizing system and not any individual consciousness or transaction, which becomes marked by signs and especially numbers, plate numbers, cross references, software codes, tags, indexes, footnotes, appendixes, etc. The space of secrecy or interiority has been externalized. What do those “interior” structures (of reading/seeing/feeling) look like from the perspective of a book, which is always the starting point of a book that is constantly defining its boundaries? Something is turned inside out. It is highly probable in this system, like the microfilm system during the Cold War, that someone will emerge as a reader. Is the reader a narrative that describes a temporal process (event) that ebbs away after “seeing” something? That’s the bet!

Tapper: Well, let’s say we take your bet, become one of those reader-narratives who rarely finish a book, and examine what happens to affect in 7CV. As we loll about in the ambient environment, wondering whether we’re reading Seven Controlled Vocabularies, Obituary 2004, or The Joy of Cooking, remaining untroubled by the distinctions, we come to rest in one of those spa-like mute spaces, but it isn’t long before our eyes stray toward text, which you say are just as mood-based as the photos. So let’s say, for instance, that we’ve read the short text about logos on page seventy, received a mild kick of pleasure from glancing downward and recognizing the back of a MetroCard, then sat becalmed for a few moments as our eyes shift right to one of those nearly mute spaces, here defined by an almost but not quite recognizable surface bearing date stamps and some kind of code. And if we turn the page, we find the story about how you met your wife Clare at Macy’s (or was it the Bulgarian Bar?), and so receive another pleasant dose of emotion. But mood, or affect, surfaces and disappears in very contradictory ways in different sections of 7CV. In the apparently “personal” anecdotes from “Two Identical Novels,” like the ones about driving your father’s old Mercedes, or the reading habits of Tom Newlin, the Russian literature professor at Oberlin, the lazy reader-narrative takes pleasure in the pathos and humor of these stories. And yet, in the academic-sounding texts in “A Dictionary of Systems of Theory,” affect seems to play no role at all, and if our reader-narrative meanders through the ambience to the fourth preface (which may very well have been the first thing we read in the book, or the fifth, or the twenty-seventh) we encounter an assertion that frames human emotion, in the context of its representation in cinema, as something deeply mechanical: “It is hard to experience an emotion that is a diagram but of course all emotions are diagrams. Lars von Trier said that” (144). The notion of ambience and yogic relaxation that you’ve invoked seems far from the kind of emotional discomfort that we are typically subjected to in a von Trier film. I’d like you to talk about whether, like von Trier, 7CV is also engaged in a kind of diagramming that treats emotion as a mechanical outcome of the reading process.

Danny Snelson: You write: “7CV may not be poetry at all” and “This can only be done from the system of poetry!” I’m curious about the location of 7CV among the arts referenced by metadata on the cover, literary and non-literary — architecture, photography, cinema, music, painting, fiction — all of which come packed with historical contexts and user expectations. You note that “the novel cannot imagine itself” as a way to locate the heterogeneous writing styles comprising 7CV within a necessarily poetic system. However, Ron Silliman, on receiving the book, places it firmly in the “Books (Other)” category. I’m not sure I agree and hope you can tell us a bit about why and how (if?) 7CV is poetry. Aside from its material location in the Wesleyan Poetry series, and the wonderful self-cataloging identifications on the cover (“China — poetry,” “Poetry — therapeutic use,” “Poetry — social aspects”), the book can surely be read within other systems. We’ve recently discussed, for example, how the book need be different from the art-design publication studies of Dexter Sinister or Dispatch Bureau and similar art-world conceptual activity (where a startling number of artists are now creating “poems”). Similarly, while we’ve discussed Koolhaas’s essay “Junkspace” in relation to ambient stylistics, the more experimental OMA book projects raise a number of questions related to the work in 7CV. Is it, following Luhmann, a systemic process of “irritation” that you are initiating with poetry cataloging (the contextual strategies Goldsmith, among others, are engaged in)? Or, as I’ve a hunch, something closer to your conception of “poetry” proper? Anyhow, I’m interested in how “Tan Lin” is plugged into various sites in art, architecture, the academy and poetry. I’m interested in how you navigate these fields. Do you imagine the disciplines listed in your tags reading the book?

Lin: Hmm, as I’m thinking of one question I’m being distracted by another, so I think this will answer both Danny’s and Gordon’s questions!

I was trying to think of what happens when I read. What are feelings in the moments before they become feelings? I would say that the whole book is an affective and highly generalized/generic reading environment i.e. the system is mildly affective (as it is being read) but it also images or represents reading as a process or system that is affective in its couplings (irritations or attunements) with consciousness. Affective logic is a logic of putting things next to each other, pictures and texts, newspapers and novels, Taco Bell and Macy’s. When we read anything — menus, literature, shop signs, architecture, airport monitors — we are in a state of waiting as it were, to form some emotional connection, or feeling, in relation to something, and that something, that structure of feeling is ourself in relation to the environment. So in this sense, the affects in 7CV are oblique, passive, influenced by things like Chinese cookbooks, childhood (memories), the foods I eat at WD 50, and, since I am a professor, things I read. In other words, they are almost always not there or they seem to belong to other people in a room. They don’t have a pronounced developmental arc (narrative) or a recognizable shape like “anger” or “love.” They are not very Freudian and have not been much cognitivized. But this is the nature of the affects, as opposed to the “drives.” There is a Luhmannesque system of feelings here, linked to Daniel N. Stern’s affective attunement. I was trying to align the reading practice with questions like why and how we read, and it made sense to link reading to what Antonio Damasio calls “background feelings” or what Heidegger terms Stimmung or mood, that prior, often pre-cognitive and even pre-perceptual “atmosphere in which intentions are formed, projects pursued, and particular affects can be attached to specific objects” (Jonathan Flatley). Reading is an ambient or quasi-architectural awareness of (our own and other people’s) feelings before they become feelings. It is loosely coupled to textual and non-textual, visual and tactile, printed and non-printed matter. It creates things (like books) to read (inside our heads) within a general environment or medium of perceptions and affects. Reading as system images or mirrors a range of emotions (dramatic, cathartic, academic, mild, drugstore-like, cinematic) that are ostensibly “outside of itself”; a few of these are gut wrenching, most are fleeting and minor, and they emerge from a mood or atmosphere I associate with poetry. Maybe we read to self-reflexively create a system for what babies, children and adults do twenty-four hours a day.

Lars von Trier uses specific genres, specifically melodrama, represented by the flowchart/storyboard diagrams in Dogville, to produce, directly and bluntly, emotions of extra-ordinary phenomenological intensity. The beauty of his work is that such emotions are made to feel so intensely real and cinematic. Affects are generated “artificially” via “low” genres like melodrama and musical and then paired with a medium (“high” cinema) that is perceived to distort them, i.e. render them larger than life. The emotions of melodrama are customarily overscaled. In 7CV, I approached the problem from the other side: highlight not the artificiality/conventions and thus the specific forms/genres (art) used to produce affects, but the standard, non-descript, generic everydayness of the production of the most minor, amodal, and least intense of our passing moods. The idea was to create a book of theory/novel/artists book somehow contained in a poetry series, in a poetry medium about everyday (prose) reading practices. Or to be more blunt, I wanted the poetry system to effectively neutralize the artist book, just as it would neutralize the overly emotive, ineffable “poetic” elements. Poetry, like the affective system, is a medium punctuated by couplings and a few metadata tags. I wanted something that would, unlike many artists books, actually be read and subject the reader to everyday, durational, absorptive reading, and that would, unlike a novel, be read in a discursive, factual, standardized way. Or to put it more simply, poetry that would read like nonfiction. The reading environment constitutes a system of perceptions wherein the feelings inside of us come to be reflected back to us.

Asher Penn: The title of the event held at Penn on the twenty-first of April was: “Handmade book, PDF, Lulu.com Appendix, PowerPoint, Kanban Board/Post-Its, Blurbs, Dual Language (Chinese/English) Edition, micro lecture, Selectric II interview, wine/cheese reception, Q&A (xerox) and a film.”I have the feeling that this title arrived at the last minute. How did the project start? How did it change up until the date of the event?

Lin: Yes, and I’m not even sure the titling has arrived yet. What you have in the list is a flexible pre- or post-titling apparatus that never quite caught up with the event itself, or a set of bibliographic controls for books that do not exist (yet). As of this interview, nearly a month out, everything is still in social process (I like to think of it as a kind of bibliographic picnic!) on wikis, in unedited PDF formats, etc. Maybe it’s useful to think of that social process as a medium. At any rate, medium (say language) and channel (say computer) are mixed together. By June 24th [2010], at the Printed Matter launch, we’ll have quasi-finished PDF downloads, PowerPoint pieces, films, a few POD books entitled “Selected Essays” and “Blerb,” Object Inventories, Chinese language editions, Critical Readers, Indexes, Bibliographies, etc. Rachel Malik’s notion of a publishing horizon (see her essay in Selected Essays) as opposed to a book is a useful construct and here that concept is rendered as a social gathering replete with emotions (more later!). So, I was not interested in a publication that crowns or documents the event but in Braudel’s longue duree, a horizontal frame in which publishing continually takes place and which slowly and dully sanctions publication and editorial events along the way. Writing, particularly literary writing, generates interest over time. I was interested in generating less interest or nominal data over time. Writing is subsumed by editing, which is subsumed by publishing practices, and the latter is a subset of computer-mediated communications (CMC). CMC are not homogeneous but platform-specific, although they are marked in general by frequent modification of short form entries in reverse chronological order, as in a blog, SMS, or discussion thread. Given this, the above titles list is a kind of inventory in reverse chronological order, or publishing as a titling or bibliographic or marketing (i.e. text and image) event prior to the event — much like a PR agency. At any rate, distinctions between pre and post-reading, writing and editing, and text and paratext are rather fluid. Reading and publishing are processed by CMC today, and this is heightened by “value-added” e-book platforms, where visual components of textual processing are packaged with a “book.” The Penn event explores that mode of book processing (reading/writing/editing/disseminating) from a systems (publishing/social network) perspective. Another way to think of this mode of editorial control is via Foucault’s genealogy, which “maintains passing events in their proper dispersion.” What was dispersed, like a retweet, at UPenn was wine and cheese, seminars, blurbs, scholarly editing and bibliography, minor canonization, accrual of cultural capital, and PowerPoint — as well as a host of software applications and technological apparati. So here the two principal actors that work to author material are the social context and computer-based media — both of these facilitate the transfer of data. So yes, information is a little like wine and cheese!

Despite the haphazard appearance of the titling, the project was neatly circumscribed by the nomenclature of Edit: Processing Writing Technologies. Within this conceptual apparatus, there were things I couldn’t in good conscience want: people writing novels or poems or doing “performance editing” in the buff. Mild editing is good enough. Writing is too much. The practices that day were not meant to be aesthetic, by which I mean they were intended to mirror rather than diverge from content production today. For example, most user-posted videos comprise an archive not designed for revisiting or reminiscing in, and it’s hard to imagine rereading Facebook status updates! Within a web-based reading environment, a lot of material is written (once), reviewed later that day with a cup of tea, and then forgotten. It doesn’t need to be edited because it was already written in edit mode or in a wiki modifications mode. I would say Facebook as a genre is still, thank goodness, only mildly aestheticized i.e. edited. We don’t write so much anymore as manipulate existing content. Editing, as discourse, applies not just to texts but to menus, my internet dating trajectory, posting details on Facebook’s news feed, tweets, Obama’s highly mediated presidential campaign, Flickr group albums, interactive news, reality TV, other people’s playlists, Goodreads reviews, and “personal” or attribute-keyed music recommendations on Pandora Radio. We live in an era of endless and communal cross- and self-editing, like retweeting (RT) at Twitter! Likewise, instead of filtering and preservation, the chief aim in much blog writing (and the Penn event) is not (bibliographic/editorial) control of content for future access (i.e. a library’s use of controlled vocabularies) but instantaneous personal expression around ephemeral content creation and informal classification structures (folksonomies) and uncontrolled vocabulary systems. This is especially true of things like LiveJournal but it’s also true of filter blogs and knowledge or k-blogs, which are “authoritatively” marked by outbound links. Self-publishing in particular has gravitated towards less authoritative and more ephemeral, event-, self-, or platform-based forms where the line between “primary” i.e. authorial content and “secondary” i.e. user-generated content (forums, comments, and internal blogs) is eroded, and where multiple authors contribute posts and links in both synchronous and asynchronous formats and with increasing anonymity. As of this interview little of the Penn event is finished except the Chinese-English language version, which lacks photos. You can get that book here: It’s unclear if these books will ever be “finished” — the editors can emend, revise, and republish the “titles” on their respective wikis.

So to return to your questions, the titles are flat containers, what information specialists might call namespaces, metadata fields or vocabulary systems, used to catalog an event that has yet to transpire. What does the word “publish” mean today? Danny is managing “content” and assigning editors. Editors are designing covers. In this context 7CV is less an object with an author than data to be edited, organized, tagged, reformulated, republished, blurbed, annotated, indexed, resold — by others. And that is what I think reading should be — taking hold of another text, customizing it, disposing of it. Benjamin Disraeli said when he wanted to read a good book, he wrote one. But today, why read or write a book when you can edit it? Editing is the new writing. The Penn Event aligns itself with such discursive practices — nominally self expressive writing and/or knowledge sorting within self-publishing. Editing and self-publishing are weak genres, or social agreements.

For this reason, I see a direct correlation between self-publishing books and Facebook, Twitter, Lulu or Flickr. Facebook and Twitter are theatrical spaces for self-publishing and editing one’s evolving social coordinates. We are so immersed in ostensibly free form and unrehearsed sites that it is hard to see them as highly scripted social spaces or theatres. Of course most people don’t think of editing/publishing as theatre but as something boring or parasitical (vis-à-vis a “source” text), a textual backwater populated by people with glasses. But I think publishing a book today is theatre, socially networked theatre, and the Edit event exemplifies publishing as everyday performance. Facebook and Flickr are our era’s administered and generic version of sixties happenings! Flickr albums mostly look all the same, and this is true of most of the images in 7CV — they could belong to anybody, and many of the images were taken from discarded photo albums or are the backs of books, I suppose a marketing director’s nightmare. So in that sense, the event at Penn that day translated the reeditioning of 7CV into a bibliographic happening, underwritten by affective modes of reuse, editing, archiving, MP3 background music, and library science. We had pizza! We drank wine and chatted! I wanted people to have a good time.

Status updates on Facebook constitute a continuous and communal editing (and conversational diffusion) of a life’s impersonal events rather than a diaristic recording or writing of the feelings as a “published author.” Ditto with 7CV and its extensions. What search engine developers term filtering (i.e. self-reflexiveness about the medium itself, as manifested in meta data containers) is more granular in a conventionally published memoir or poem than in a blog or its hard-copy cousin: a self-published Lulu edition, but I think this is changing.

Another way of saying this is that the titles of the event are pragmatic and context sensitive i.e. they are a fantasia of classification. The (editing) vocabulary system is a generalized medium or generic (table of) contents. Like a rudimentary tablature for string music or a playbill for a play, they guide, like a kanban board, the general flow of production but don’t proscribe it. We live in an age of weak authors and strong communications networks and high sensitivity to labels, and I do not think this is a bad thing! After all, if networks and captions are strong, authors do not have to be. Authors can disappear into a search engine, reading/reviewing network like Goodreads, blurb, or Google Books, where a book evolves from a stand-alone object into an information entity classed with other entities. Editing makes authors disappear rather than show up as guests on Oprah! Books without authors are more pleasing (and easily digested) than books with authors. 7CV is about fast reading and ease of ingestion of written and reprocessed material. We live in a text-based rather than image-based moment, which is one reason I find the most interesting cultural activity in textual rather than visual arts, and why if I had a choice I’d probably get a degree in information science rather than English or in painting!

Editorial note: The following conversation has been adapted and edited from episode 22 of PoemTalk, recorded September 14, 2009, at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and transcribed by Michael Nardone. The episode discusses the twelfth poem in Louis Zukofsky’s series Anew, a poem which begins “It’s hard to see but think of a sea.” The Anew poems were written between 1935 and 1944 and published in March 1946 by James Decker’s press in the small-format pocket-poetry series. Marcello Booth has dated the writing of the poem precisely January 16–17, 1944, a week before the poet’s fortieth birthday. PennSound’s recording of Zukofsky reading the poem comes from a homemade reel-to-reel tape Zukofsky prepared for the Library of Congress in November 1960. PoemTalk is sponsored by PennSound, the Kelly Writers House, Jacket2 and the Poetry Foundation. Al Filreis led the conversation with Charles Bernstein, Wystan Curnow, and Bob Perelman. Listen to this PoemTalk podcast as an MP3; this program was discussed on PennSound Daily on September 18, 2009. “Poetic Electricity,” a followup post with commentary on this episode, by poet and engineer Aryanil Mukherjee, can be found here. — Lily Applebaum

Al Filreis: Peter Quartermain, who has written a close reading of this poem, says about the beginning that it sounds almost like doggerel. And he was on his way to praise its very striking rhythms. Anybody want to say something about how the poem sounds, of course, now that we’ve heard Zukofsky reading it? What does it sound like at the beginning?

Bob Perelman: Well, I remember the first time I read this poem and being delightfully bollixed by the first line, thinking, now, wait a minute, what did I just read? It was because of the punning. It’s about seeing and thinking, but clearly sound is in play as well. And the interplay between all the senses and the trans-sensual waves that he is talking about are all there in a nutshell in that opening line.

Filreis: The homonym comes metrically halfway, so see-sea divides a mostly metrically regular line into two bits. It gives way to longer lines, but at the beginning it is almost like doggerel.

Charles Bernstein: People who don’t have the text of the poem can’t tell that the first sea is S-E-E, and the second is S-E-A.

Filreis: You can’t tell from context?

Bernstein: You can’t be sure. There’s a split always in this poem because of its reference to the quantum physics that underlies some of the subject matter — between doubleness of different things, so that light can be a particle and can also be a wave. See can be S-E-E; it can be S-E-A. So the interesting thing, in respect to the sound recording, is that what you hear with your ear is not the same as what you see with your eye: the hearing of the poem switches, and what happens over the poem is that many of the words switch in their value from one thing to another —

Filreis: Like an electric current, almost.

Bernstein: Like a sea. Right.

Wystan Curnow: It’s less doggerel a line when you hear him read it.

Filreis: Less doggerel hearing it than seeing it on the page?

Curnow: Than seeing it on the page.

Filreis: Does anybody think Zukofsky is speaking knowledgeably about the world of electromagnetic science and radio?

Perelman: Well, I connect this poem with the first half of “A”-9, which he had finished just a little while before. As he says, he spent two years on it, where, among other things, besides using the Marx — Capital —for the vocabulary, he uses —

Filreis: Karl Marx.

Perelman: Yeah, a physics textbook on light that talks about exactly the same thing: matter and energy transforming back and forth. So, it’s a sort of mini-version of “A”-9,and a more discursive, relaxed version.

Filreis: Wystan, to what extent does, as Bob was suggesting, the actual thinking about electromagnetic science, radio wave, and so forth, serve his purpose as a poet, aesthetically? How does it work? It’s not an end in and of itself, is it?

Curnow: I don’t understand the physics — I don’t know what a condenser is.

Filreis: I imagine that most readers of this poem go into it not knowing about that.

Curnow: So, then I want to look it up. Then I wonder about looking it up.

Filreis: You mean, whether that would be productive?

Bob Perelman and Wystan Curnow at the Kelly Writers House.

Curnow: Whether it would be productive, because I also thought there’s an attempt here to look at some kind of physics, but the intention actually is to propose something to do with meaning. That is very implicated in polysemy and metaphorical applications. The way those terms actually get localized to their very specific uses and then become unrecognizable as ordinary words, or as words that operate in other forms in other parts of the language. My sense is that’s happening here just with condenser and condensed, as an ordinary word: it’s that round and round and round that I got to.

Filreis: But is there a relation between condenser, in a physics sense, and the poet’s act, especially in the opening lines of condensing large material into short lyric lines?

Bernstein: And also stress, the double sense of stresses: electric stresses across condensers, then there’s another stresses later.

Curnow: That’s right.

Bernstein: Both of those suggest sound stresses, as in metrical poetry, but, at the same time, electrical impulses, to which there could be a connection.

Filreis: What is the connection between this vocabulary of physics and the wonderful stuff at the end about seeing many things at once, the harder the concepts get?

Bernstein: The material at the end is a very beautiful and touching poetics when Zukofsky turns forty: “Which is a forever become me over forty years.” I think the poetics, in respect to quantum, goes back to Einstein’s theory of relativity: relativity and meaning are context-dependent.

Perelman: I actually want to say that by the end of the poem, I’m reminded more and more of the Romantics and Wordsworth, Wordsworth saying in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads one of his hopeful pronouncements, that wherever science goes, the poet will go, and the poet will animate the, sort of, lifeless —

Filreis: And you of course have the child inside the poem.

Perelman: And you have the child, you’ve got the flowers, you’ve got the retina turned, made human by light. I mean, that’s pretty Wordsworthian, with more succinct vocabulary. And the identification with the seeds, “the weed / One who works with me calls birdseed.” This is, after all, the poet who writes “A” and I think very much identifies with any one of those little seeds. You know, the little word a, the little anything, the little mote, is also the infinity that is his human life. The big flower will find a vase, the little flower is just as valuable and as potent and as enlargeable, or it contains the world just as much.

Filreis: So, it’s the romanticism of the child put into the context of twentieth-century science, of Einsteinian and quantum science. Because this isn’t “I go back to child,” this is “I am simultaneously child and me.” That produces multiple subjectivities and multiple attentions.

Bernstein: The “poetics” from this would be: I see many things at one time —

Filreis: That’s right —

Bernstein: — the harder the concepts get, or nothing. But the or nothing is crucial.

Filreis: So let’s go large, then. Anew is said by many people, and maybe it’s simply a facile conclusion, to be a way of starting afresh. Zukofsky’s biographer Mark Scroggins referred to this as part of a move away from the political toward the personal — I probably would quibble with that. Williams, who loved this book and reviewed it in 1946, said this is a new line in a new measure, this is adult verse. And another critic said that this is a fresh beginning. Partly, I think, they were relieved by the fact that “Poem beginning ‘The’” had this sort of vortexical, Poundian documentary collage style, which drove them all crazy. Anew you can probably read without that. So maybe they were cheating and being easy, but to what extent is this different from the earlier Zukofsky? To what extent is it continuous? And Anew means a fresh start: I mean, somebody said this is his La Vita Nuova. Would one go that far?

Bernstein: I think, following up on what Wystan said earlier — if he would look something up, would it tell him something — I’d say no. The poem is not comprehensible in the sense that it will restore you to the knowledge you already had of what those words were. The words in the science itself are metaphorical: particle, ray, light.

Filreis: “This science is then like gathering.”

Bernstein: I think this poem is as complex and difficult as Zukofsky ever is, and as absolutely what it is, as an object or another thing in the world, which is refracted like light through a prism.

Charles Bernstein at the Kelly Writers House.

Filreis: So, Bob, what’s your take on this idea that Anew is a fresh start for Zukofsky in terms of his poetics?

Perelman: Well, the one thing that is different about it is its discursiveness. I mean, certainly what Charles just said about its thorough complexity is absolutely the case, and nevertheless, it is also a bit conversational, almost anecdotal. It is not the eight-voiced fugue of “A”-8 —

Filreis: No, by no means.

Perelman: — or the obsessive-compulsive patterning in “A”-9, to use a clinical term I am only using metaphorically, but, in fact, it is: “Gee, I’m forty, I’m thinking about my entire life, I’m thinking about my childhood, I identify with this little bit of pollen on the flower,” et cetera.

Bernstein: The child could also be Paul, who was just born at that time.

Filreis: He would be two at the time, right?

Perelman: That’s very true.

Curnow: The poem breaks in two, to an extent. I mean, partly, the printout is in two pages. And it changes remarkably. And the Romantic side of it is very much in the second part. I mean, is the first part separable as a poem in and of itself? My page ends on: “And tho infinitely a mote to be uncontained for ever.’

Filreis: Full stop, new sentence.

Curnow: Yes. I mean, it’s almost as if the second part is an add-on or another poem.

Perelman: The first part is really all about the speck, the sea, the mote, the physics, the tiny becoming infinite, and then this science is almost a criticism or a, let’s think about it, reflect on this.

Curnow: Yes.

Filreis: I would ask any of you, or maybe all of you: why is Zukofsky not better known among the modernists of his generation and the one just before? There are probably complicated reasons for that. I mean, for one thing, isn’t it the case that only one or a couple of books are in print?

Bernstein: The only book of his poetry that’s now in print is the Selected Poems from the Library of America that I edited.

Filreis: It’s a beautiful book.

Bernstein: And it’s highly condensed, Zukofsky in only 150 pages.

Perelman: Condensed into a speck.

Filreis: And you included this poem. Why?

Bernstein: I felt it was a key poem within this sequence, and I wanted to edit the whole volume along Zukofskian principles of condensation and specks, metonymy, the parts standing for the whole, so that it would be a good introduction for somebody who has never read Zukofsky. The scale is greatly diminished in terms of size, but all the different aspects, or most of the different aspects, the crystalline aspects of his work are present. Another question could be: why isn’t poetry better known? Why isn’t American poetry better known?

Filreis: So, you feel it’s an analogous question, because some of the poets we admire are better known than Zukofsky. Bob, any sense? You love Zukofsky.

Perelman: You know, to be kind of dully sociological, the poetry is very difficult. To quote one of these lines here, I’m trying to find it here — “Or a graph the curve of a wave beyond all sound,” and “Than having taken a desired path a little way / And tho infinitely a mote to be uncontained for ever.” There is something very uncontainable about Zukofsky, and I think ultimately you have to identify with the power of poetry to say: that’s what we like. As opposed to feeling “this is beyond me.” I think it’s very easy for a non-reader of Zukofsky to look at this —

Filreis: And give up —

Perelman: — for thirty seconds and say, “this is beyond me.”

Filreis: Any thoughts on that, Wystan?

Curnow: Well, I don’t think, at that level, it’s that distinct from a lot of work of his contemporaries, that level of difficulty. So, I don’t think that gets in the way. I think that among the reasons, I mean, we’ve got here a standard poem, you know, a short one-, two-page poem —

Filreis: It doesn’t require too much external work.

Curnow: It’s the package that people expect poetry to occupy. Anything larger than that is regarded as a challenge by publishers, by readers, and so on.

Perelman: Syllabus makers.

Curnow: Yeah.

Bernstein: But there’s another side to it, which I think goes back to perhaps my generalization that you questioned. To use a scientific term, Zukofsky has an incredible half-life. Many of the poems that were published in 1944 have no bearing on us right now in 2009. This poem still has a life and it becomes more and more intense. And for the people interested in second-wave modernism, or modernist American poetry, Zukofsky becomes more and more significant each year. So, perhaps, that’s the trajectory that goes against the idea of popularity.

Filreis: Let me ask each of you to offer a brief final word on this poem, or maybe something more on what you get from it.

Curnow: Well, I’ll start because I’m the least expert in Zukofsky. I’ll just say that what we’re talking about, you know, what puts people off poetry, the kind of syntax, the kind of difficulty, the sense that the meaning is spreading that occurs line by line, phrase by phrase, is something that I enjoy per se, right, and think that if I spend more time and effort, I’ll get more from it. What puts some readers off is precisely what attracts this reader — and I’m not alone — to this poem.

Filreis: Well said. Thank you.

Perelman: I’ll just say it’s really a great poem, one of, I would say, Zukofsky’s greatest hits. There are many. This is certainly one of them.

Filreis: Thank you. I agree.

Bernstein: There’s a way that we’re reading it, which I want to emphasize is the way to read, which is to sample, to move up and down, not to try to make linear sense, because the poem is not linear. That’s one of the senses of quantum theory and the theory of relativity, which goes against the traditional, linear, rational idea of what meaning is. Williams says, famously, “A poem is a small or large machine made of words.” And Zukofsky says here “Large and small condensers,” and then toward the end, “I am like another, and another, who has finished learning / And has just begun to learn.”

Filreis: That’s terrific. I’ll throw in a final word very briefly. The ending is just so wide open. This semantic, grammatical sense is wide open — “A child may as well be staring with me” — not at me, but with me. So, they together — the adult, who is forty, and the child, staring at what, we don’t know, although the word at is going to come up: “Wondering at the meaning / I turn to.” The meaning could be the thing he turns to, but wondering at the meaning could have an implicit comma at the end: “I turn to last / Perhaps.”

It is absolutely stunning, absolutely open, and there’s about three or four things you can do with it, including the Romantic trope that we were talking about.

Editorial note: Jerome Rothenberg (b. 1931) is the author of more than seventy books of poetry, including Poland/1931 (1974), A Seneca JournalKhurbn and Other Poems (1978), (1989), and most recently Concealments and Caprichos and Retrievals: Uncollected and New Poems, 1955–2010 (2011). Rothenberg is also known for championing “ethnopoetics” and curates an ethnopoetics section at UbuWeb and his own blog/magazine, Poems and Poetics. He has translated works by Paul Celan, Garcia Lorca, Kurt Schwitters, Pablo Picasso, and others and has edited several important anthologies, including Technicians of the Sacred (1968), A Big Jewish Book (1977, 1989), and Poems for the Millennium (1995, 1998, 2009). The following transcript has been adapted and edited for readability from a conversation that took place at the Kelly Writers House in Philadelphia on April 29, 2008, among Rothenberg, Al Filreis, Bob Perelman, Steve Fredman, CAConrad, Thomas Devaney, Murat Nemet-Nejat, and others. Rothenberg was brought to Philadelphia as part of the Kelly Writers House Fellows program, directed and hosted by Al Filreis. This program and surrounding events are available at PennSound. — Katie L. Price

Al Filreis: Good morning. The first thing we need to do is once again thank Jerry and Diane Rothenberg for coming a long way to the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania. Thank you. We had a fantastic day yesterday. It was a long day, and we had a lot of different conversations about Jerry’s work. For those of us who were involved … I’m sure I’m speaking for others, I know I am because I spoke with a lot a people. When I say that it was an enormous pleasure, I mean in the Rothenbergian sense of pleasure: the receptive, creative pleasure of art.

It was fun. We had a good time.

The format this morning is quite simple. It’s an interview/conversation. Jerry and I will talk for about half the time about all kinds of things informally, and at a certain point, I will turn it to you, the audience here in the room, but also to those viewing us by webcast.

So, thanks again, Jerry. I guess the first question I have is about your uncle. You’ve said in a poem and in a preface, and also in conversation that the only story that has come directly to you, or indirectly maybe, about the Holocaust and your family is the uncle who was hidden by partisans and who found out about his family killed, I think at Treblinka, and drank a bunch of vodka and blew his brains out. There were obviously others who were lost. When you got back, when you got to Treblinka, it wasn’t a roots visit, it was something that happened along the way because you were already in Germany. You decided to make the trip and you went to Treblinka but there you said that the poems you heard at Treblinka were the clearest messages you’ve ever gotten about why you write poetry. Can you explain that a little more? And specifically, what do you mean “you heard the poems at Treblinka”?

Jerome Rothenberg: It wasn’t as if a voice was speaking to me.

Filreis: Glad we cleared that up. [Imitating] Jerry —

[Laughter.]

Rothenberg: But it was as if that was the experience plus more. I don’t know that I began to write those poems following the Treblinka visit, which was early in the trip or later — having passed some time in Krakow, in Silesia, we then travelled to Auschwitz. But the whole thing, from the moment that I set foot into Poland, I had a great sense of upset. You know, it triggered something. I think quite understandably.

Rothenberg: The clearest message, yeah, in the sense that I think for many of us, maybe most of us, who became poets and who had lived either directly or vicariously through the experience of the Second World War and the Holocaust, that great, very intense and very brief period of destruction, only a few years, you know. I’ve always tried to get an accurate account of how many people were killed during that time from 1939 to 1945 — an extraordinary number of deaths, of burnings, of maimings.

I think I began to write poetry under the impact of that, as did others of my generation. I don’t think I can define very clearly what I mean. I understood then, for the first time, and was willing later to say that something of what had happened there was what brought me into poetry in the first place.

I had been meditating on or thinking about the statement, attributed and sometimes mistranslated from Adorno, about not writing poetry after Auschwitz. But that was wrong, because really what drove me into poetry, or what I feel retrospectively drove me into poetry, was precisely the consciousness of Holocaust. And not just what happened in the death camps, although that was an extremity, but you know, the other things, the further one got away from the war itself. And what happened at Hiroshima began to sink in first. I was a kid when we got news about that. I don’t think there was for me, at the age of fourteen, a real sense of the horror of Hiroshima, but it didn’t take long before I realized what we had done there. And then, of course, things like Dresden only came to light for us much later.

Filreis: And you don’t really disagree with what we imagine to be the impetus behind Adorno’s statement, which is that poetry after Auschwitz would be barbaric?

Rothenberg: Oh no, though he was limiting himself pretty much to lyric, lyric poetry, and would refine his statement later. And I also came to see that lyric could itself be a form of resistance.

Filreis: That is to say, you believe that the enormity of that situation robbed language of its capacity to express appropriately what had happened. The disagreement is what happens afterwards, because you believe strongly — and you’ve said this in Khurbn, you’ve said it at the end of The Burning Babe, I believe, and you’ve certainly said it in various statements — that poetry is all we have left. [“After Auschwitz, there is only poetry.”]

Rothenberg: Well, I think that the transformations that poetry makes possible were to me a more meaningful response than silence. Although silence can be very powerful, but who will know about it?

Filreis: Well, there are some artists who would argue differently about silence.

Rothenberg: Yes, but somebody has to get the word out.

[Laughter.]

Anyway, silence was not an option.

Filreis: Silence was not an option for you.

Rothenberg: Silence means withdrawing from the world.

Filreis: In the Elie Wiesel sense, that if you’re silent you’re helping the bad guys. Don’t be silent in that sense.

Rothenberg: Yes, but it’s not just the Elie Wiesel sense.

Filreis: I know that, I threw that in to get a rise out of you.

Rothenberg: You generally assume that if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. This is stated in many different ways. As a poet, I began more and more to talk about the response to that midcentury Holocaust, holocausts, and to so much that followed, the response being through the transformed language of poetry, and of course other responses also.

Filreis: What’s so great about Triptych, to me, one of the things that’s great about it is it brings three books together: Poland/1931, Khurbn, which is the book we’re talking about now that is a more or less direct response to the Holocaust, somewhat belatedly, and The Burning Babe, which is — I don’t want to say the word “about” since we’re talking about Stein later, aboutness is not appropriate — but if it’s about anything, it’s about a millennialist. It’s millennialism, there’s 9/11 in it, there’s the bringing together of Dresden and Auschwitz and New York and all kinds of things. And one of the things that’s so remarkable about Triptych is what it allows you to say about this whole portion of your career, your writing, that you started to use archaic and primitive materials, living with the Seneca and so forth. And somewhere along the line you realized, well, you know, the Jewish stuff is cognate to that, those are some of my archaic materials. I think I want to do some of that. And the first instance of that here is Poland/1931, which you’ve said in a number of ways is not about the Holocaust. You didn’t say it is an avoidance of the Holocaust, but I read it as a kind of swerve around the Holocaust to do other things. Then Khurbn, which partly results from your visit to Poland and to the camps.

I tried to ask you this yesterday and I didn’t do so well, or you just evaded it somehow —

Rothenberg: Very likely.

Filreis: I guess I want to ask — since I brought up Wiesel — a kind of Jewish identity question. That is to say, I think it’s possible to read Poland/1931 as avoiding the Holocaust in a way that Khurbn definitely does not. You kind of got to this belatedly —

Rothenberg: It may avoid the Holocaust, but it certainly doesn’t evade the Jewish identity matter.

Filreis: You’re absolutely right, but you seem to be in Khurbn, you seem to be ready to fully embrace the connection between your interests and exploration of the archaic materials, your status as a poet, the Poland/1931 material without the Holocaust, and then the Holocaust added to it because it makes all those connections for you. And I still didn’t ask the question well

[Laughter.]

Are you avoiding your Jewish identity?

Rothenberg: No, no. I mean, the one thing I do try to avoid is —

Filreis: To be pinned down?

Rothenberg: To be pinned down.

Filreis: I can tell that.

Rothenberg: I mean the career is … the writing is much more extensive than the Jewish identity matter.

Filreis: Absolutely, of course.

Rothenberg: At a certain point, I come to write Poland/1931, you know, but I’ve been writing twenty, twenty-five years before that. It’s not my subject from the very beginning. Although I’m willing to accept that the Jewish is in me, with me, you know. I’m not in a state of denial about that, though sometimes it can be a difficult thing to carry along with you.

Filreis: Sure, sure.

Rothenberg: Part of the identity question is a sense of being under the gun. Even vicariously experiencing the Holocaust as a kid in the Bronx, one knew that here we were, potential victims. There were photographs. I didn’t know any of the people who remained in Poland, but there were photographs of children my age who disappeared, who were killed, who were murdered.

Filreis: Just to take this, I’m imagining — forgive me all sophomores out there — I’m imagining the sophomoric question: looking at the whole arc of the career — again, forgive me — and that person says, you know, this is really cool, this Seneca material, this is really great, and he writes — meaning you — in the preface to Shaking the Pumpkin or something, you know, very boldly, we must cross over into different ethnicities, different ethnopoetries. So it’s okay for me, in America, a white Jewish American poet, to cross over into the Seneca. I’m going to do that. I know there’s some risks involved, but I’m going to do that and we really need to do that. And you said it at a time when there was a lot of separatism going on, and some people might say, you know, Jerry, you have no business going there, but you did that.

And again, back to this sophomore who might say he made that bold crossing, but he had the Jewish materials right there, and he didn’t do that until Poland/1931, how come?

Rothenberg: Because I can make the bold crossing precisely because I did have the Jewish materials. And there was a kind of recognition between me and various American Indian and African American poets: that it was easier to make the crossover with an assertion of an identity that I would also —

Filreis: Interesting, interesting. More Jewish questions, sorry.

Rothenberg: No, go ahead.

Filreis: I’ve been haunted by your Jewish dream. This is a dream, it’s the beginning of the prose that opens A Big Jewish Book. And I wondered if you would be so kind as to read the opening passage, which would be in here. I’ll give you the page number.

Rothenberg: If you give me the page number I will do that.

Filreis: One eighteen. I wondered if you would read that, and maybe I’ll ask a question. I am haunted by this dream.

Rothenberg: I was too. Sometimes I make up dreams, but this was a real dream. A classy dream.

[Laughter.]

Filreis: Maybe read up to there.

Rothenberg: Okay. As far as that? Sure.

Filreis: Do you mind?

Rothenberg: Yeah. Though it’s really at the beginning, the dream.

Filreis: The beginning is the good stuff.

Rothenberg: Freud and the Interpretation of Dreams as a series of little prose poems.

Filreis: Yeah, he does. I was thinking of that.

Rothenberg: Dream descriptions. And one of them he labels a beautiful dream.

Filreis: We’re going to do a little psychoanalysis after you read this.

[Laughter.]

Rothenberg [reads]: There was a dream that came before the book, and I might as well tell it. I was in a house identified by someone as the House of Jews, where there were many friends gathered, maybe everyone I knew. Whether they were Jews or not was unimportant: I was, and because I was, I had to lead them through it. But we were halted at the entrance to a room, not a room really, more like a great black hole in space. I was frightened and exhilarated, both at once, but like the others I held back before that darkness. The question came to be the room’s name, as if to give the room a name would open it. I knew that, and I strained my eyes and body to get near the room, where I could feel, as though a voice was whispering to me, creation going on inside it. And I said that it was called Creation.

I now recognize that dream as central to my life, an event and mystery that has dogged me from the start. I know that there are other mysteries — for others, or for myself at other times, more central — and that they may or may not be the same. But Creation — poesis writ large — appeared to me first in that house, for I was aware then, and even more so now, that there are Jewish mysteries that one confronts in a place no less dangerous or real than that abyss of the Aztecs:

… a difficult, a dangerous place, a deathly place: it is dark, it is light …

and with a sense, too, that this space must be bridged, this door opened as well — the door made just for you, says the guardian in Kafka’s story. Yet Kafka, like so many of us, poses the other question also: “What have I in common with Jews? I hardly have anything in common with myself …”

I think that’s probably the best place to end.

Filreis: That’s where you want to stop? Alright, so can I do the interpretation?

Rothenberg: Sure. Sure, doctor.

[Laughter.]

Filreis: How long have you been feeling this way, Jerry?

This, to me, is the creation moment. This is where your Jewish self as a poet is created, here. The dream is the dream of the darkness that gives way to the Jewish poet. And in the paragraph you didn’t read, that comes afterwards, you talk about Poland/1931, which is the book where you basically declare this is of interest to you and you treat those materials as you’ve been treating all the other archaic, primitive materials.

Rothenberg: Should I read that other paragraph?

Filreis: Yeah, I’d love it.

[Laughter.]

Filreis: I always get my way here.

Rothenberg: It was just so nice to end on Kafka.

Filreis: That Kafka stuff is great. And you dragged Kafka into this too.

Rothenberg [reads]: For myself it had suddenly seemed possible — this was in 1966 or ’67 and I was finishing Technicians of the Sacred — to break into that other place, “my own … a world of Jewish mystics, thieves, and madmen.” From that point on, it opened up in stages. Images, once general and without particular names, now had identified themselves. I let my mind — and the words of others, for I had learned as well to collage and assemble — work out its vision of “fantastic life,” as Robert Duncan had called it for all poetry: an image in this instance of some supreme Yiddish surrealist vaudeville I could set in motion. With those poems (Poland/1931) I made a small entry, American and eastern European; yet something had dropped away, so that it was now possible to “be in common with myself,” to experience the mystery of naming, like the thrill and terror of my Jewish dream.

Filreis: So to continue the interpretation: there you have the names that are inchoate, you couldn’t name them, but now the naming — you do the Genesis thing. So now you are doing the godly thing of naming. This is the beginning. Fair enough?

Rothenberg: That’s fair enough, though Adam not God is the real namer. A little —

Filreis: A little what? A little reductive?

Rothenberg: A little overblown. This is all overblown.

Filreis: Diane, does this resonate with you?

I’ll send you the bill later.

Look, I have a million other questions, but this is probably a good time —

Rothenberg: You know, but it was suddenly possible, and partly I’m responding to so much that’s going on, to the time of Black being beautiful and the American Indian movements, but more than that. I mean, in the ethnopoetics, I’m finding sources of poetry, not as a question there of any kind of identity —

Filreis: Yes, sorry about that.

Rothenberg: Sources of poetry. But beginning to think that there are the Jewish sources. And what if I begin to work from within that? The one thing is that I can work from within that in the way I would never, say, in writing Seneca Journal, you know, pose as an Indian. I would never in Technicians of the Sacred do that kind of costuming, play acting. You know, except, I could do it as a joke, but not in any serious way.

Filreis: So the surrealist vaudeville was made possible by this move?

Rothenberg: The Yiddish surrealist vaudeville, by the way, is a designation David Meltzer gave me.

Filreis: It’s an apt name for that book.

Rothenberg: I really should have credited him. I’m not clever enough to come up with that —

Filreis: So Triptych was made possible by this particular move?

Rothenberg: Yeah, butTriptych happened in stages.

Filreis: Yes, of course.

Rothenberg: The notion of bringing that together. You know, of course, a bigger book was possible. The writing around the Jewish dream, writing the Jewish poem, extends, you know. A Big Jewish Book is 650–700 pages of working through this in the manner of Technicians of the Sacred and Shaking the Pumpkin. So that’s part of it. A smaller series of poems called Fourteen Stations, which works off traditional Jewish numerology to —

Filreis: And Gematria, maybe even out of that?

Rothenberg: Gematria is something like a 250 page book of short poems constructed in the manner of traditional Jewish numerology. You know, this is sort of my Jewish Oulipo.

[Laughter.]

Filreis: There is a Jewish Oulipo.

So look, I want to open this up to the floor. And I open it up to the floor.

Rothenberg: And feel free to ask about Dada —

Filreis: Yeah, feel free to get away from the Jewish question.

Rothenberg: But you don’t have to.

Filreis: CAConrad is right here. In orange. Good morning.

Conrad: Okay. I know you’ve covered this a little bit already, and you covered it last night a little bit too, but on the back of your spell book, Gris-Gris, you mention that you began writing Poland/1931 when you were taking on the assembling of Technicians of the Sacred. And was there something specific about that anthology that led you … that opened the door to Poland/1931?

Rothenberg: Well, in the sense that Technicians of the Sacred is my discovery of the power of traditional sources. And I go ranging through that particularly into those areas which had been misnamed primitive, because they are truly areas of tremendous development of poetry and vision and so on. Once I was into the sources, not as a roots question, except that, you know, if you want human roots, right? That is also the search for human origins. Where does this practice — that some of us think is so important and others think is absolutely besides the point — where does it come from? So it’s a search for origins of speech, of language, of poetry, of art, by seeing the vast array of forms they’ve taken.

I remember at that point that some of us were trying to push this back into, you know, other animal presences. Is there an art practiced by primates? Can you teach apes to speak? What’s the extent of language? When does language begin? Is the creation of language a basic poetic act? At some point there must have been geniuses among the non-languaged primates who created language —

Filreis: And as you said, there is no such thing as a primitive language in your opinion.

Rothenberg: Today?

Filreis: Or any time.

Rothenberg: No no no. At some point very far back it had to have started.

Filreis: I’m sorry, there’s no such thing as an unformed or unfinished language, you’ve said.

Rothenberg: Today?

Filreis: Yeah.

Rothenberg: In a certain sense all languages are unfinished. It was too easy to categorize certain cultures as being primitive when, in fact, in various areas there was a deep development over centuries and millennia. Languages everywhere are complex and can be fitted to almost any task. Certain languages do basic mental operations better than our language. So we have to monkey around with our language to get it to do things that, say, a language like Hopi is able to do [snaps] like that. But there are things that we do, you know, that … we would probably have to manipulate Hopi in various ways.

Filreis: You once said that primitive means complex.

Rothenberg: Well, most of those languages that have been tracked and have been labeled as primitive were not primitive at all, but very complex languages. The ceremonial poetry, the ritual poetry, the shamanistic poetry that was a part of those cultures was, if you looked at it in the right way, complex: often very complex in meaning, certainly complex in performance, corresponding to our own search for a total work of art. The good ol’ German gesamtkunstwerk. That existed there. We were not dealing with some kind of primitive blah blah blah, you know, unformed words. Languages keep forming in the world through pidgins and creoles, then becoming separate languages. But even there, that’s often a complicated linguistic base to start with.

Filreis: Thank you for the question, CA I believe we have a call coming in on the phone.

Caller: Hello.

Filreis: Who is it?

Caller: Steve Fredman.

Filreis: Steve!

Rothenberg: Hello Steve!

Steve Fredman: Hi guys.

Filreis: We can hear you quite well. You want to ask your question?

Fredman: Sure. When you mentioned “fantastic life” from Robert Duncan in the preface to A Big Jewish Book, I was thinking about the fact that Duncan’s fantastic life is soon to be before us in print. And I was thinking about, Jerry, how much over the years I’ve heard you mention in different ways your fondness for Robert Duncan and indebtedness to him in different ways. I wondered if you could just talk about that a little bit. This will take us off in some ways the Jewish subject, and maybe even off the primitive subject to some extent. I was thinking about the ways in which Duncan seemed to open up different possibilities of writing and poetics for you over the years, and I wondered if you could maybe sketch out a trajectory of your relations to him as a writer yourself over a period of time.

Rothenberg: I could write a book to talk about Duncan. There was, to begin with, a very friendly response at a point when I still thought of myself as being isolated from other poets, or working within a small group of poets in New York. Duncan responded very quickly to what I was doing with that eagerness to enter into communication. There was never a big correspondence between us, that is, letter writing. I mean he was a maniacal letter writer, and I was, at least before the Internet and email, a very sparse letter writer.

At the time when City Lights was publishing my first book, and actually my first anthology, called New Young German Poets, Diane and I went out to San Francisco and at the City Lights bookstore, during a photo op, met Robert and spent time with him and Jess. Immediately, because so immersed in poetry and ideas as he was, immediately he began to lead me towards certain things. Let me point out, I think it was from him that I first got the recently published Gershom Scholem book on major trends in Jewish mysticism, but in exchange I gave him Paul Celan.

Duncan was a little suspicious of Paul Celan —

Filreis: Really?

Rothenberg: Yeah, because he had picked up, he thought, a certain — you know, this is kind of internal in lefty movements of that period — but he picked up maybe something a little commie about Paul Celan.

Filreis: A little what?

Rothenberg: A little commie.

Filreis: A little commie, and Robert Duncan didn’t want that.

Rothenberg: You know, Robert was having problems with the Stalinist part of the left. It was sort of a silly reading of the phrase from the Spanish Civil War, No pasaran!, going into a Celan poem.

Shortly after, Robert came to visit us in New York. So most of the contact was really direct rather than letter writing.

He was, for me, one of those with whom every conversation could be valuable, and maybe because we didn’t see each other that often. There are others with whom I’ve worked and shared ideas over the course of time like David Antin who goes back with me and with Diane for over fifty years. And David is also a great producer of ideas and insights. David and I have known each other over that whole time, sometimes almost on a day to day basis, so there’s a lot of small talk between me and David. But with Robert, it was invariably more than that.

Filreis: Steve, are you still there?

Fredman: Yeah.

Filreis: Can you say briefly what you think the Rothenberg-Duncan connection is?

Fredman: Well, I’ve always been struck by your invocation of the phrase “symposium of the whole” that is almost a talismanic phrase in your work it seems.

Rothenberg: It’s a title of a book. And, of course, it comes from Robert.

Fredman: And that’s certainly one of the things I was thinking about: the whole notion of culture as assemblage, and of the grand collage, the poetry of all poetries, that seems to be something that’s very much central to your work as well.

Rothenberg: Well, that was part of what was, well … in Duncan I found a poet — what was he, ten or twelve years older than me? — who was writing a certain kind of poetry that was attractive, but also opening up a world that integrated contemporary twentieth-century poetry from other places. In a way, Olson never meant that much to me in terms of the mixing of old and new. Olson was, let me say, too much of an Americanist. Gary Snyder was also too much of an Americanist, although I valued them both. Gary turned toward the East, toward Asia, you know, but I had one foot still in Europe. If there was a conflict with Europe, it was a conflict with England, and that stranglehold that British poetry had on our own poetry. But we were drawing so much from France, from the European continent. I saw what we were doing as a continuation both of certain streams in American poetry, but also that we had taken over something from France, or brought it over here. We hadn’t taken it away from them, although I think to some degree they had given up on it. But it was passed along, you know, as Kennedy said, “through this generation of Americans, a torch has been passed” —

Filreis: Passing the torch. That’s a good imitation.

Rothenberg: And Robert intensified that sense for me.

Filreis: Well thank you, Steve, for the question. Take care.

Fredman: Thanks for the answer.

Filreis: Bob Perelman has a question.

Bob Perelman: This is just a footnote actually to the Duncan question. I was thinking last night when you were reading The Burning Babe, there’s the Duncan suite, the Southwell suite about the Burning Babe. Which is the chicken, which is the egg? I think they’re contemporaneous, right?

Rothenberg: No, no. Duncan certainly came before. The Southwell suite was before my version. Not necessarily before Poland/1931.

Filreis: The Burning Babe is recent.

Perelman: I see.

Filreis: Thank you, Bob.

Tom Devaney has a question. Good morning, Tom.

Thomas Devaney: Good morning, Al and Jerry.

Filreis: Tom, you said that the poems last night washed over you. You were very moved.

Devaney: That’s true.

Filreis: Can you say more about that?

Devaney: That’s true. Well, about that, I guess a comment: Philip Whalen has a poem where he quotes Allen Ginsberg saying something about Thelonius Monk, and he says, “O yeah, he has the music going on all of the time. You can see it when he is walking around.” And I think that about your poetry. And that’s one of the things that’s just so pleasurable about it whatever the content: that music.

So, the question I have, which is unrelated to that comment —

[Laughter.]

Just whenever I am listening to you talk about poetry, you keep talking about your travels and the places you’ve been. But then, in your poems, they seem to be just populated with people more than places. So, it’s both. But when I hear you talk, you’re always travelling, and then in the poems there’s so many people. I don’t know if there’s something there. That’s a comment-observation-question.

Rothenberg: I can often misinterpret myself when I talk about myself, but it seems to me I came to writing out of travel fairly late along. In the same way that I came to, very deliberately, write the Jewish poem. Poland/1931 is about place. I don’t think it’s just about people. I think place comes into it. The Bialo forest, the names of towns. I think the town names come in much more in the second part of Triptych, in Khurbn.

I thought for a long time that I really couldn’t write out of travels. I enjoyed travelling. I enjoyed meeting people on the travels. All of that was fine.

Filreis: So doesn’t the Tsukiji fish market poem count as —

Rothenberg: No, no. That comes later.

I think — although talking on the spot I might be forgetting something — I think, for me, in 1997, we spent four months in Paris, and I was translating Picasso poems and there’s a whole series of poems that came out of being there. You know, a few years earlier, that Tsukiji market poem in Japan, and the poems coming out of other Japanese visits. Early, maybe even earlier, a visit to Greece touched off a series of poems called “An Oracle for Delphi” and the Khurbn poems were also out of travel. But it’s from the 90s on that travel, the places I’ve been, begin to come into the poetry.

Filreis: Several reviewers of your book A Paradise of Poets said — and they were positive reviews, generally — that there was something about the poems, many written in Paris or about Paris, and Japan, there was something about voluntary, temporary exile that created in you, seemed to create in you, a sense of elegy: a sense of being displaced, or lost. Certainly “Paris,” in the three Paris elegies, is a poem about all the gone people, all the ghosts, and the cemeteries. Even the Tsukiji market poem, which is about all the dead bodies of the fish and the earthquakes … is there a connection between travelling and being away from home, and that feeling that’s happened to you recently, that elegiac feeling?

Rothenberg: Only that, as I’ve said, the elegiac feeling probably goes back to —

Filreis: Birth.

[Laughter.]

Rothenberg: Yeah, probably goes back to birth, Al.

Filreis: I’m right about something.

Rothenberg: The first glimmerings of death.

Filreis: Poland/1931.

Rothenberg: And it kicks in.

Filreis: Why not?

Rothenberg: Let’s say at the time, writing the Paris elegies … of course I’ve reached a certain age and friends have reached a certain age, and the dying begins to accelerate. So that’s coincident with our ability to travel more and more and more.

I don’t think that it’s the travelling that kicks that off.

Although I believe that younger people probably, if they are writing about things, bring a lot of death into their poetry.

Filreis: And you don’t have to be old to go to Paris if you’re in the modernist tradition and see that Apollinaire is memorialized there. In other words, it’s a series of markings of gone modernism. And of course Vienna Blood, which is a wonderful book, I take it to be partly about the way in which World War II, Nazism, didn’t just get rid of the Jews. It was anti-modernism, it sort of cleared the field of a certain modernist intellectual, and Vienna Blood misses that. You know, you’re really missing that there.

We have a question from someone by email. Erin?

Erin Gautsche: This is a question from Robert Sward.

Filreis: Robert Sward, the poet. Hello Robert.

Rothenberg: Hello.

Gautsche [reads]: Paul Blackburn was a dear and valued friend. I knew him in New York in the 1960s, and it was Paul who introduced me and other writers to Julio Cortazar, Garcia Lorca, Octavio Paz, and Provencal poetry. He was passionate about their work. To what extent did Paul Blackburn influence you and your work with ethnopoetics?

Rothenberg: It’s a good question. Paul certainly influenced me as a presence and a very close friend. Again, he was very encouraging, responsive to the ethnopoetics work. I don’t think that he influenced me in getting into the ethnopoetics, but there was a lot that we shared. He taught me a lot about the sound of my own voice listening to him. He was an extraordinary interpreter in readings of his own poetry. Again, he was writing very much in the American grain, probably more than me. But at the same time, Europe was part of his consciousness, particularly France, Spain, Toulouse. He was a translator. We’ve hardly spoken about translation, but we had a bond as translators. Along the same lines, he did the greatest translations of Troubadour poetry, far surpassing Pound as a translator from the Provencal.

So a magnificent poet. Really somewhat, because he died young, in danger of becoming a lost poet.

Filreis: Why do you think that is?

Rothenberg: Well, because Paul shied away from speaking much about the nature of the work that he and others were doing. He was not a commentator in the way that, say, Creeley, was. Creeley could talk a mean streak about poetry. Paul didn’t. That was not his style.

In my mind, Paul is very much the equal of Creeley as a poet. But Creeley lived on until eighty, or almost eighty.

Filreis: And he really was capable of being programmatic.

Rothenberg: They were born the same year. Paul, were he alive, would be eighty-two years old now. Diane shakes her head — a little hard, a little hard to believe. So in my memory, he’s a young man; he dies in his forties.

Filreis: Well, that’s another reason why we’re not reading him.

Rothenberg: He died, and the death of a poet can have effects. Paul was a presence because he was a presence. He was there. He brought his poetry from place to place. So, there is the possibility that in the series that we are doing, Pierre Joris and I, are doing for the University of California Press, Poets for the Millennium, that one of the next volumes that we’ll bring out in that — it’s little books of individual poets — will be a Paul Blackburn volume.

Filreis: Thank you for the question, Robert. Lee Ann Brown has a question? You look like you have a question.

Lee Ann Brown: I just basically wanted to hear more about the confluence of the surrealist and the dada with the more ethnomusicological poetry you brought to the forefront, because to me that is one of the best things —

Filreis: You mean the convergence of those two modes?

Brown: Saying how avant-garde that is, you said looking at it in the right way, that ethnomusicological work … and what is that right way to look at it? And just talk more about those radicalities of those two different kinds of strands.

Rothenberg: Well, the dadas and surrealists, like other poets and artists early in the twentieth century, were very much in the process of discovering the human roots of poetry and art. So the first considerations of so-called primitive art as something more than primitive come from those early modernist movements.

Filreis: Certainly on the painting side, but not quite as much on the poetry side?

Rothenberg: On the painting side, or on the sculptural side, because Picasso could lift up the small statue or the mask or whatever it was when he makes the statement about this being as beautiful as, or more beautiful than, the Venus de Milo. The poetry presented the usual language barrier. But that was coming out also: among others Tristan Tzara compiled an anthology — I think never published it in his lifetime, now it’s ready for publication [translated by Pierre Joris] — around 1920 —

Filreis: Of?

Rothenberg: Of poems from Africa and Oceania. Blaise Cendrars did an African anthology. Benjamin Peret, a surrealist poet, a pre-Columbian one. Michel Leiris was both a poet-writer and an anthropologist. So there are a lot of predecessors there. It’s part of what I was saying about — which I became very aware of travelling just now in France with the French translation of Technicians of the Sacred — how much of the impetus for that kind of thing comes, in fact, from France, with the work carrying on, if you want to talk in those terms, in a French tradition.

Somebody, I think it was Donald Allen, very early in my time as a poet — you know, I had not appeared in the first edition of New American Poetry — but I met Donald Allen around that time, and of course he was pushing an American agenda with the New American poetry, and he said, “You, of course, are an international poet.”

Filreis: Aha!

Rothenberg: So I said, of course: What the —? An international poet? What does he mean by that?

But over the years, I’ve thought that’s very insightful. Yes, I am an international poet. And proud of it.

Filreis: For those who have not explored the connection that Lee Ann’s question asks about, between the primitive poetics and archaic materials, and dada, for instance, this book, Prefaces, which collects many of Jerry’s prefaces and other critical pieces, prose pieces, hits this point five or six times brilliantly. And so, if you want to explore that point, this is the book to use.

Filreis: Do we have another question? I know that we have one coming from email.

Gautsche: This is from Doctor Gorsky [reads]. What is the current nature of American avant poetics? Can you suggest some poets and/or mediums that represent significant newness?

Filreis: That’s a big question.

Rothenberg: That is a big question.

Filreis: Do you want to take a small slice at it? And don’t mention any poets in the room.

Rothenberg: Oh.

Filreis: Sorry, Bob.

Rothenberg: Sorry, Bob.

Filreis: You can mention any poet you want.

Rothenberg: Let me say I want to avoid specifics on this caught on the spot. But let me make a comment about my relationship to such a question. One of the factors of having too many years in the world of poetry is that you begin to lose track. I find that after your generation, Bob, which is not that much different from mine, but different enough —

Filreis: There you go, Bob.

[Laughter.]

Rothenberg: It becomes more and more difficult for me to —

Perelman: They all write alike.

Rothenberg: They all write alike because they all don’t write alike. It becomes difficult, particularly when a question is asked to single out a few people. If you single out a few people, that becomes a difficult thing.

Filreis: Bob wants to say something.

Perelman: At first, I should say for the record that that was a joke, what I said before.

Filreis: Which one, that they are all writing alike? P E R E L M A N. He said it here: you guys all write alike.

Irony.

Perelman: No,but a serious question, and this maybe goes back to the Jewish stuff: a polemical moment in your career that really stands out is your essay against Bloom, where you pull no punches. The question there is his absolutist sense of poetic hierarchy: that there are good poets, and then there’s the rest, and we can discard them.

Filreis: And also the agonistic relationship among poets.

Perelman: Right, right.

So, in some sense, I can imagine that the avant-garde, for you — with your sense of international poetry, world poetry, tribal poetry — that poetry is a universal human attribute that is useful at all points and all times. That in a way, the whole notion of the avant-garde, of the chosen ones who are ahead of all the benighted —

Filreis: Lessers.

Perelman: Lessers who are stuck in the old ways — that would be actually a rather antithetical concept to your larger poetic project. But on the other hand, of course, I think both of our poetic upbringings are through, loosely termed, an avant-garde scene. So, it’s a funny kind of tension, is it not?

Rothenberg: No, it is. It is a funny kind of tension because part of the avant-garde project, as I understand it, was the democratization of art. But there’s a tension because you’re setting yourself apart as the chosen, visionary company. Avant-gardes are always self-proclaimed. You have to proclaim yourself an avant-garde. And yet, on the masthead of The Surrealist Revolution, the surrealist magazine, there’s a quote from Lautréamont: “Poetry is made by all, not by one.” Poetry is made by all, not by one.

You know, usually one doesn’t think of an avant-garde of one. Avant-garde seems to presuppose a collective enterprise.

[Laughter.]

Filreis: Stein. He’s holding up Stein’s book there.

More on that later.

Rothenberg: He’s holding up Gertrude Stein’s book Portraits and Prayers. But even Stein is working with Picasso and others. Holding up the book Portraits and Prayers, most of them are portraits of other poets and artists: Picasso, Matisse, Cezanne. She’s obviously seeing herself as part of that company. But there is a possible conflict between the self-proclaimed group of avant-gardists and the desire towards the democratization.

Filreis: We have to start to close. Thanks, thanks for the question by email, and also Bob for really interestingly refining the question.

Alright, let’s go ahead and take that question.

I have two more questions, but we’ll take this if it’s someone in the visionary company, and if not, we won’t.

[Laughter.]

I’m kidding, I’m kidding.

Yes, go ahead and bring it on.

Hello?

Caller: Hello.

Filreis: Hi. Who are you?

Murat Nemat-Nejat: I am Murat Nemet-Nejat.

Filreis: Ah, Murat!

Rothenberg: Oh, hi Murat.

Filreis: Are you in New York?

Nemet-Nejat: I am in New York.

Filreis: You should be in Philly.

Rothenberg: That sounds like W. C. Fields.

Filreis: Anyway, welcome. Do you have a question for Jerry?

Nemet-Nejat: Yes.

Filreis: Great. Go ahead.

Nemet-Nejat: Hello, Jerry. This is Murat Nemet-Nejat. I have a question related to what Lee Ann was asking really. I wanted to ask, in your view, is there a tension between the religious spirit and the secular spirit in this whole poetic experiment, both in the avant-garde and the ethnopoetics? For example, you know, the religious, the traditional poetry has a very strong oracular element. And also, when you talk about your own experiences at Treblinka, you talk about the word “hearing” — hearing a poem, hearing the poems. But in your reaction to the first question, you said it wasn’t really hearing; it was not something like this.

And my question is, is it possible really to have, to write this kind of poetry that you are interested in from a purely nonreligious —

Filreis: Secular.

Nemet-Nejat: Secular voice?

Filreis: Thank you, it’s a great question. I’ve been wanting to ask that.

Rothenberg: I think it’s a great question because, for me, it’s the central question of much of what I’ve done. That is, how can one keep a poetic tradition alive in a secular world? And I certainly don’t want to go into a religious world. I’m a secularist. I want to have nothing in a personal way to do with establishments of religion, but I recognize the sources of poetry resting on a religious basis. That’s where they come from. That’s the varieties of religious experience so closely connected even with forms of poetry that don’t have visionary things coming into your head but writing processes. So, I have no answer to that. I’m saying: that’s the question. For me, that’s a very, very central question. And I think books like Technicians of the Sacred and much of what we do are really playing with that question.

Filreis: But because you raise the question, you often will say in an introduction or even in a preface to a poem you are about to read — for instance, “A Paradise of Poets,” the poem — you say I am not thinking of this in any religious sense at all. You have to keep saying that for us to understand what you mean because your work does lead us to a consideration of the sacred in a religious sense.

Rothenberg: Yeah, I think all I was saying, by the way, in response to that question about the poems I first began to hear —

Filreis: At Treblinka.

Rothenberg: At Treblinka. That I don’t want to suggest that I’ve gone into a trance at Treblinka and poems are being dictated to me as perhaps to —

Filreis: Jack Spicer.

Rothenberg: Jack Spicer or to Maria Tsvetaeva. That’s not it, but that puts me into a certain condition of poetry different from other more programmatic ways of writing poetry: a little bit of that Jewish Oulipo.

Filreis: Murat, thank you for asking the question. Thank you for calling.

The sun, just this moment, came out here in Philly, so I hope it does the same in New York. Thank you.

Nemet-Nejat: Thank you very much.

Filreis: Bye-bye.

I have two more questions, Jerry. My favorite piece of prose — just a hilarious thing you said that the students and I talked to you about yesterday — you were asked by someone, well, how do we do poetry in the classroom, and you said it’s like the way they taught us sex in the old hygiene classes: not performance but semiotics. If I had taken Hygiene 71 seriously, I would have become a monk. And if I had taken college English seriously, I would have become an accountant.

[Laughter.]

Now that’s an extreme statement and we are at a university, and the university is paying my salary and your honorarium. But other than that —

Rothenberg: Yeah, that’s my David Antin phase.

Filreis: So you’ve pulled a little away from that.

Rothenberg: I usually hold back from that.

Filreis: But to the extent that it’s true: so the English major in an English class, instead of moving towards poetry, is more likely to become an accountant. If that’s true, why is that?

Rothenberg: Well, I would have become an accountant.

Filreis: That’s what you’re saying. Oh, you really are good. You are so good.

And what about sex?

Rothenberg: What about sex?

Filreis: You would have become a monk. I mean the analogy is quite daring.

The way they teach sex makes you not want to do sex. The way they teach poetry makes you not want to do poetry.

Rothenberg: Well, it strips the passion. That’s a Paul Blackburn expression, by the way. If Robert Sward is still listening, that’s a —

Filreis: Thank you, Robert.

Rothenberg: “Stripped all passion from the sound of speech.”

Filreis: So, let’s not let the university strip passion from the sound of speech.

Rothenberg: That poetry is a passionate undertaking. It inevitably gets taught in classrooms, and there are ways to ameliorate that. I’m sure you’ve experimented —

Filreis: We’re trying. Having you helps.

Rothenberg: With classroom situations.

Filreis: Which brings me to my last question. You went to Celanversity. You visited Paul Celan in 1967. That was your first meeting with him. And in some ways, since the poem about Celan appears in a series called “The Notebooks,” in some ways it was … the poem is a kind of recording of that first encounter with him. I was very moved by the poem. I adore Celan’s, admire Celan’s poetry very, very much. And the poem records a kind of mistranslation. You are not speaking a common language, literally. You are having some trouble communicating.

Rothenberg: I can give a prose explanation.

Filreis: Would you? And would you also then read the poem?

Rothenberg: Sure.

Filreis: Thank you, as a way of concluding.

Rothenberg: I was put in the, I think, fortunate position of being perhaps the first person to translate, and publish in a book, translations of Paul Celan. And that was in that first book for City Lights: New Young German Poets. And an invitation that came to me from Ferlinghetti: did I know something — I didn’t — about new, young German poetry? And I didn’t.

Filreis: And you didn’t?

Rothenberg: But would I be interested in assembling a City Lights Pocket Poets Series version, and I was interested. Celan was one of the poets that I came to. So it was early translation of, maybe first translations of Celan, of Günter Grass, Enzesberger, of Helmut Heissenbüttel, of Ingeborg Bachmann, and so forth. It was a good, good thing to happen. And there was a little bit of correspondence with Celan in the process.

And then in 1967, we were travelling to England, to London and to Paris. Celan, of course, was living in Paris and teaching at the Ecole Normale. I guess I dropped him a note. There was some possibility, what was it, Unicorn Books here in the States had approached me about doing more translations from Celan, although I was a little frightened off at that point because his poetry was getting so difficult, so really Celan-ish. But I wanted to meet him.

He did not have the great reputation that he has now, so I didn’t have the sense that I was meeting an icon, that kind of figure. But he said sure, come over to the Ecole Normale. I did. We met in his office. Then we went around the corner to a cafe and spent maybe three hours together talking. What came out of the conversation was a little awkward because my spoken German is not so good, and his spoken English is not so good.

Filreis: And did you have Yiddish in common?

Rothenberg: Ah, but that was the question. Yeah, you know, we had this conversation and among other things, Jewishness came through.

Filreis: Full circle conversation we’re having.

Rothenberg: There were various people who had become interested in translating him. Were they Jewish enough? Or did they know enough Jewish things? A lot of suspicion of other German poets over the Jewish question. So that kept coming into it.

But it was a nice conversation. And at the end of it, as we were leaving the cafe, I asked him if he spoke Yiddish. And he said yes. Although, I’m sure he said it was not really a language he had until sometime during the war and the camps. So I said I thought it was rather curious that he had Yiddish, and I had Yiddish, but we were stumbling around in German and English.

Filreis: And then you had Yiddish. This is what moves me about the poem so much because mama loshen [mother tongue] is the thing that’s left. Both of you were sort of grappling with what’s left. It’s the Adorno question again. And both of you, in my opinion, the best of all, the two of you, you through Khurbn in particular, had been dealing straight on with this question of what is left in language after such disasters. That’s why I chose the poem to end with, and I hope you will read it.

Rothenberg: Yeah.

Filreis: And this is an elegy. This is in his memory. Correct?

Rothenberg: Yes, this is.

Filreis: This is from The Notebooks.

Rothenberg: This is a letter to Paul Celan, in memory. Does the term mama loshen —

Filreis: Yes, mama loshen is in there.

Rothenberg: Yes, loshen is the Hebrew and Yiddish word for language. Mama loshen is the mother tongue.

Filreis: And mother is a big deal for Celan because he lost his mother.

Rothenberg: Hebrew, in that tradition, would be … they don’t call it the father language. They call it the holy language. Loshen Kadush: holy language.

A letter to Paul Celan, in memory, December ’75.

So after he is dead.

[Reads “A Letter to Paul Celan, in Memory, December 1975.”]

Filreis: Jerome Rothenberg.

[Applause.]

Thank you, Jerome Rothenberg.

Thank you Jerry and Diane. Thank you Mark Lindsay, Jamie Lee Josselyn, and Ellie Kane. Thank you all for coming. Thank you for coming very, very much.

Explain thro’ a brief analysis why the reading of any poem of your choice, by yourself or someone else, is enriched by bringing a science-informed interpretive strategy to bear. The poem may or may not be working consciously with scientific allusions; if you think it will help, refer to one poem that is and one that isn’t.

Armantrout:

Dress Up

To be “dressed”is to emit“virtual particles.”

*

The spirit of “renormalization” is that

an electronall by itself

can have infinitemass and charge,

but, when it’s “dressed” …

*

A toddler stares at ustill we look up.

“Flirtatious,” we call it.

She waitsuntil we get the joke

about being here,being there.

I want to use my poem “Dress Up” to illustrate some issues I raised in my answers to questions 1 and 2. The first two stanzas of this poem are paraphrases (condensed and rearranged) of Steven Gubser’s The Little Book of String Theory. Gubser’s writing interests me both because of the peculiarity of the metaphors embedded in it and because of the deep strangeness of the phenomenon it describes. A “dressed” electron is one that has emitted “virtual” particles. As most of us know by now, virtual particles spring into and out of existence spontaneously (and in pairs no less). This has always made me wonder what “existence” means. Anyway, virtual particles are — in some sense — not fully real and yet it is only when an electron emits such particles that it has a realistic (as opposed to impossibly infinite) charge and mass. “Renormalization” — a fecund word in itself — is the mathematical process of canceling out infinities by putting in the values for the virtual particles. The word “renormalization” suggests suspect tinkering. But it’s the word “dressed” that’s really interesting. One could say that the electron can’t “realize” itself until it has clothed itself in some fantasy get-up. Note that I don’t say that — but one could.

The third section, obviously, comes from another place entirely. It depicts a toddler I saw in a bank lobby. She was playing a kind of peek-a-boo with me, staring at me until I looked up then giggling and looking away. I had the sense that she found the whole presence/absence, self/other dynamic essentially comical. Now I’m not saying that the girl is an electron or that the electron is a girl. That’s a standard rhetorical move I refuse. It would be silly. I am equally interested in the real child and in Gubser’s book. I want to link them in tandem, to “entangle” them, as it were, to see what sort of resonance they might establish. There’s a parallel of some kind here, I feel, but not an equation. At least that’s how I experience it. I hope others will too. [for more poems by Armantrout, see the “Poetry Supplement”]

Adair:

Pope, An Essay on Criticism (1711):

True Wit is Nature to Advantage drest,What oft was Thought, but ne’er so well Exprest,Something, whose Truth convinc’d at Sight we find,That gives us back the Image of our Mind …

And Williams, Spring and All (1923):

I find that there is work to be done in the creation of new forms,new names for experience and that “beauty” is related not to “loveliness” but to a state in whichreality plays a part

I used to think these were opposite credos: Pope saying that there are no new ideas (tho’ the lines get trickier the closer one scrutinizes them, as many have said: is nature dressed to advantage still nature? etc; and he was writing in the relatively new form of heroic couplets), WCW saying the times demand new ideas — as would Stein three years later in “Composition as Explanation”: “The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything.” But more and more I came to experience recognition as a key aspect of reading poetry, and it tended to be recognition of things I hadn’t realized needed recognizing. So Pope’s line shifted toward something like: “What you didn’t even realize you’d tried and failed to put into words, or what you’d never thought was even up for that, and are glad now to see expressed — and in some way, however briefly, empowered by that; the world becomes a little less opaque.” (Still a way to go with the elegance here) —

I think that’s precisely what I felt with Rae’s poem “Dress Up.” When I first read it, I was reminded of something the science fiction writer (among many other things) Samuel R. Delany said back in the 60s: that one of the things SF can do is literalize metaphor. Now it never occurred to me that the poem is saying “the girl is an electron or that the electron is a girl.” But there seems to be indeed “a parallel of some sort there, but not an equation.” It brings an everyday experience into fresh focus to place it in the vicinity of something we know or believe is literally true and strange. I’ve never so sharply understood the fascination of Freud and his followers with the fort-da game before. In a comparable way, I’ve never so vividly imagined population increase as when I read the obituary section in Kenny Goldsmith’s Day: person after person “survived by” four or five children, multiple grandchildren … from just one day in just one city —

One of the preoccupations I acquired on first moving to London in the late 70s was with vast, unthinkable numbers of things — and of people. This would relate to science in a very broad sense, bringing in technology, architecture, medicine, sanitation measures, bureaucratic organization, mass food production, etc. Population and factory farming are now, arguably, symbiotically linked. What does that do to our sense of morality, of the value of a single life, of, indeed, the politics of Food Inc?

Adair: I’m wondering if it might be useful to take a poem whose scientific sources we feel we more or less know & look for some aesthetic dimension of it we haven’t hitherto queried & that might help shed light on its knitting-into / challenging of the presently complex cultural field. For instance: The following poem, from a forthcoming collection sable smoke, took off from something I learned (but had no way based in my own areas of expertise of confirming) from Brian Greene’s The Fabric of the Cosmos (2004): that while pretty much everything we know, including the destiny of our own deaths, confirms an irreversibly forward arrow of time, no one has so far devised a mathematics that would demonstrate some physical cosmic necessity for this; weirdly, all time-related equations, from Newton thro’ Einstein & beyond, work equally well if time is going forward or back. The poem’s governing conceit is that in that case, we can go back in time; of course, we’d experience it as going forward, but instead of learning things day by day we’d be forgetting them … we’d be growing younger rather than older, & moving beyond birth to disappearance.

as if there werea last glance wipeshairs & umbrellas streets

scrubbed of bustlersin daguerre exposureswhy we cannot

travel back (intime)’s mathematicallyundemonstrable either

way a wedgeup over the top orback down the

slope to an equivocal“blast of silence”declaring annihilating

unityof significationcomponents hold beyond

otherwise most troublesomejitters of mattermoment to moment

remanifesting rather thanwavely persisting if tickfailed to physically

tock it back whosever themath (even boltzmann’s)as persuasive heading back

Obviously I was fascinated by the physics concepts involved here, & desirous of acknowledging the intellectual tours de force they represented & the excitement they generate(d); equally obviously, I bent this toward imaginative registering of certain political realities: the active persistence of debts apparently owed to the dead (if time is going backwards, the dead will be up & about again in no time, & anxious to collect) & the apparent reversal of progress in multiple sites in the global prospect. In each case, I think that what I wrote in response to Rae’s poem is pertinent: that there’s not so much a metaphorical crossover going on as the bringing of a familiar “experience into fresh focus [by placing] it in the vicinity of something we know or believe is literally true and strange.” It’s entirely possible that this is missing the whole point of taking on recent physics as proposed by Amy (in “Disciplinary Pertinence”): “that novel sciences must have novel languages beyond mathematics that can be used to describe them.” I’d be interested to know what anyone else thinks of this.

Looking again at the poem, however, I get curious about the form. The prospective shape of a poem on the page is one of the first things to clarify in my mind, & I tend to trust it & run with it. Here what’s apparent is the short-lined tercets, the 1.5 spacing, & the division by asterisks into sections. I wonder why that seemed (& still does) the way to go. I associate the form with Williams, but not quite the way it’s used here, where the compression seems wanted to focus (to hold?) startling transformations & also ruminative stretches: “The Desert Music” in the lineation of “This is just to say”? Something or my sense of something in the contemporary [technosphere] presumably demands this here. It may or may not be compelling to others.

John Cayley: Thanks to all for the contributions so far. I’ve been thinking and writing slowly. I’m afraid that what I’m sending now is yet more in terms of ‘general remarks’ and is only about half of the prose I’d like to contribute. After this, I’d like to go back and read or reread the other contributions so far, but then go on to give some indication of the actual procedures that I’m beginning to use to make work these days, in the belief that this does bear on the questions we are addressing. I’m also planning to contribute a few actual pieces made according to the procedures I will introduce.

(I’m a little bit worried that the formatting of the paragraphs that I’m pasting in now will not survive the googlegroups cloudform. Ah well. Here goes.)

Given that the impetus and tenor of poetry is aesthetic, it is difficult to imagine that its incorporating linguistic material of any variety in any manner could be deemed to be inappropriate. Science isn’t just around us in the form of science-made-technology, it is in us and in our language. If poetry partakes of science-as-language (only) in some ‘metaphoric’ sense, well then, science-as-technology is (only) in the world in an equally ‘metaphoric’ sense. An effective or, for that matter, an ineffective, malformed machine or process both is and is not whatever its ‘science’ may be. There is no question but that science — as content or as anything — may partake of technology or poetry however we please.

Perhaps some consideration of science and poetry as cultural practices will allow greater articulation of whatever, despite my opening remarks, remains problematic for makers and readers in both communities. For the scientific community, language is a medium, one of many. Pure science is, perhaps, the symbolic formulation of what can be known about the world. As such, it is language; it is poetry. However, in practice, this formulation is only ever made in constant, reiterative experiential dialogue with all the other media which are present to us as the material world. The language of science is constantly tested against materialities that we tend to agree are external and beyond us: given.

Both communities are in the same world and relate to it as such. On this basis, Walter Benjamin might have said that the language of science — as a whole — is, necessarily, a translation of the language of poetry and vice versa. Poets, equally, attempt a symbolic formulation of what can be known about the world and, especially whenever they are ‘experimental,’ they test and retest their formulations. But language is the medium of poetry. The poet must engage, specifically, with the ‘singular (im)materiality’ of language. In so far as language is supported by media which are present to us as the material world, any relationship between language and media is arbitrary. Any media will serve, and any signifying relations will do, so long as they are some part of shared symbolic cultural practice. Crucially, the media capable of supporting language include those we associate with the mind, with operations of our subjectivities that are, typically, deemed to be private or internal. It seems to me that this is the point at which the communities of practice might diverge. I can continue to write on the basis that my practice is supported by ‘thoughts’ ‘within me.’ These ‘thoughts’ support my writing, materially, despite any lack of substantive relation with other ‘external’ media, at least until they are written down or spoken out. And even once written or spoken, any relationship between my subjective practice and the material form of its inscription (as writing or utterance) remains arbitrary. By contrast, the scientific practitioner is required to treat any unsubstantiated thought as, at best, ‘mere’ hypothesis.

Thus there is a vast subset of aesthetic linguistic practice that is unlikely ever to be accepted as scientific while, on the contrary, all of scientific linguistic practice can be encompassed by the poetic, and deturned for aesthetic effect, without implying any incoherence of poetic practice.

Scientific writing is procedural and constrained in terms of its relation to media, as indicated above. It focuses on its constrained practice of signification at the expense of the other primary dimension of the aesthetic: affect. Scientific discourse pretends both a necessary significant relationship with the world and also that this relationship is neutral, non-affective. Clearly, beyond the sensitivities that are typical of most scientific discourses, this pretended relationship implies a powerful system of affect — both in itself and as it functions as cultural and social practice. The anxiety that provoked the present discussion is, I would argue, a product of the affect generated by the discourses of science, rather than any anxiety over scientific or poetic practices of signification.

It happens that I am reading Brian Massumi’s Parables for the Virtual while being asked to think and write about poetry and science. Massumi’s introduction concludes with three good pages advocating the use of scientific and mathematical models in cultural critical philosophy. He first provides a more subtly argued, generative version of my own argument thus far — while the studiously ‘poached’ scientific model or concept “suffers an exemplary kind of creative violence” — and then, as a fine analyst of affect, he locates the more powerfully generative effect of taking science to the humanities in a productive displacement of affect, precisely — as I would say, although Massumi doesn’t give his own characterization — the authority of pretended affectlessness in scientific practice. “When you poach a scientific concept, it carries with it scientific affects …. This is the kind of shameless poaching from science that I advocate and endeavor to practice: one that betrays the system of science while respecting its affects, in a way designed to force a change in the humanities.”

For Massumi, as for many poetic practitioners, the point has been ‘to force a change’ in their own and their colleagues’ practices. For poetry and poetics, the Objectivists were exemplary in this. No surprise that we have been asked to be provoked by some discussion of Zukofsky. I agree that we must further discuss and defend our right as poetic practitioners to generate change in this manner — by bringing scientific models and concepts into poems — but in further remarks that I still want to go on to make I would rather turn to the adoption of procedures — actual practices of writing — which may appear to model scientific procedures and so represent another variety of scientific transgression into poetry and vice versa.

Durand: Gilbert, the excerpt of “sable smoke” and your discussion reminded me of recent reading of Call Me Ishmael, where Olson posits that Melville’s turn toward a preoccupation with time (via Christianity) as opposed to space (via, um, exploration, exploitation, manifest destiny?) led to a disjunct between his being and writing at the end of his life. Olson doesn’t discuss Melville’s language so much within this turn, but I was interested by the idea of how language would accommodate what Olson evidently sees as a rift between time and space as preoccupations/driving forces. I also thought about some longer epic poems, like Notley’s Descent of Alette or Rich’s Diving into the Wreck, where “action” occurs again and again, a kind of temporal loop, with little or no spatial movement. Instead, the poem is placed within a constrained space (in form as well), to me correspondent with the growing (or so I hope) perception of resources/space/land/earth as limited, obligatorily recyclable. Infinity does not seem such a timely concept “at the moment,” so to speak.

I was also interested in your second section, in which you link extinction to this sort of backward movement of time — “memory” of penguin species being lost. For me, much of my interest in science is via ecology, and perhaps one way of explaining that is ecology’s friendliness to investigating connections and systems in a tactile realm (paved to by empirical naturalists). Perhaps I’m interested in the correspondence of the naturalist to the poet, as a precursor to scientist, (although LOTS of problems, maybe insurmountable ones, with naturalist exploitative, kill-what-you-observe, processes).

Adair: Hi Marcella —

Many thanks for your thotful response to the poem — it hadn’t actually occurred to me that the various constraints in it cld be taken more positively as a strategic ecological refusal of “infinity” (altho’ you’re right about the penguins) —

About Olson: I just reread the “Christ” chapter in his book, & my first response, as it had been the first time, was to just how enthralling the writing is. The stern exactness of critical insight, the human sympathy in an inexorably lawful universe. So endless thanks for sending me back to that. It strikes me that he is proposing the simpler, future-directed time of the post-1855 Melville as operating a kind of decoherence of the space-related time he defines as follows: “Time was not a line drawn straight ahead toward future, a logic of good and evil. Time returned on itself. It had density, as space had, and events were objects accumulated within it, around which men [sic] could move as they moved in space.”

This may link up with your pointing, in Notley & Rich, to time as events-loop “with little or no spatial movement.” This can be found in multiple writers & musicians (to name only those) since, say, Stein; to stave off death is one obvious motive, or to enjoy a timeless (non-reminding) paradise before the end of one’s own time (in xian composers such as Messiaen); but it may also relate to what you indicate, an unease with the imperialisms underlying movement in space — “The sense of life and death that Melville forfeited is one the experience of space gives. The vision of it is Moby-Dick, and its savage myth.” If he’s right that time has to have “density,” then durable problems lurk here — projected into cyberspace by conceptual & flarf writers —

Armantrout: This is just a general comment. I’m starting to wish more people would post poems here. What are you waiting for? If it’s for fools to rush in, a couple already have. (I can say that since I went first.)

Adair: OK, as fool number two, I second that (remember it doesn’t have to be a new poem) —

Catanzano: Most of my poems that are relevant to this discussion require a PDF format, and it seems Google groups doesn’t support this — am I wrong? I guess I could send something to you, Gilbert? The poems I would share are from a project, “Borealis: Time Signatures,” an electron of “Quantum Poetics: The Word and Its Earthwork,” which attempts a conversation between poetic logic, scientific inquiry, and self gravity to examine poetry and theoretical physics. The project explores the influences on my poetry in relation to distinct versions of spacetime proposed by string theory, quantum mechanics, and relativity. The borealis — a legend of twenty-three writers who extend my imagination, ciphered with words and the image of a tesseract, a fourth-dimensional analogue of a cube — is worked through a series of “time signatures” that respond to the theories of time posited, including Newtonian time (linearity), Planck time (quantum mechanics), sidereal time (time measured by a distant star), time dilation (relativity), timelines (algorithmic, hyperdimensional), and morphogenetic time. The project culminates in a deciphered borealis spine [for the poem, see “Metaphor or More?”].

Adair: Here’s what to do: on the homepage, go to “Files” in the right-hand menu. Click “+ Upload File,” then “Browse.” Select the name of the file you want and click “Open.” It’ll then start to upload. When it finishes, you can add another or click “done uploading files,” at which point it’s there. As with any pdf attachment, the recipient then has to download it. I’m sure we can find a way to make it properly public to the Jacket2 readership when the time comes.

Catanzano: Hi Gilbert and all,

In response to Rae asking us to post poems, I’m sending a few from my borealis project. As I mentioned, my borealis — a legend of twenty-three writers who extend my imagination, ciphered with words and the image of a tesseract — is worked through a series of “time signatures” that respond to the theories of time posited.

Reading Rae’s and Gilbert’s poems in the context of discussing poetry and science prompted me to rethink the relationship between poetry and poetics. I recently created a fake book on GoodReads about flarf & conceptual poetics in the spirit of Alfred Jarry. One idea is that as people write reviews they will create the book and therefore become a part of the Nowhere Cooperative, the group of “authors” responsible for the book, inspired by Jarry’s Pa Ubu, King of Poland, which is said to be “Nowhere.” A few days ago Eddie Watkins wrote a “review” of the fake book and talked about being a penguin poet: “I do not have anything to say about Flarf and Conceptual Poetics because I am a penguin poet …. But what am I now but a cool penguin poet in a box with the appearance of meaning? And why am I at the equator? So away I fly on the plain-spoken wings of penguin poesy to Antarctica. Upon arrival I am informed that while I have wings I can not fly with them, however plain-spoken. Nevertheless, I am here in Antarctica where life has no meaning and I am freezing in this plain-spoken meaninglessness, and neither Flarf nor Conceptualism can do anything for me now. It is very plain here and I no longer feel like speaking. Poetry is elsewhere; only penguins remain.”

The next morning after reading this penguin commentary on how “poetry is elsewhere,” I read Gilbert’s response to Marcella about his poem’s penguin time-memory. The coincidence got me thinking: some assumptions in our conversation might be that poetry illustrates its poetics or that the poem can say that which can’t be articulated by poetics. This might be why I am also wishing we were posting poems: we know they can drive the discussion to its subspace. However: in Gilbert’s poem it seems the Newtonian linearity of time is expressed, sometimes ecologically though causation — the penguins face extinction even if time moves forward or backward. In the review of my fake book, the penguin poet is also part of an ecology, albeit one detached from Newtonian physics by existing in the Nowhere environment of the imagination, and by nowhere I also mean elsewhere or everywhere, just not somewhere, maybe like quanta. In Rae’s poem being here and being there is similar to being elsewhere and everywhere but not somewhere; one must dress up, make the costume, play like the toddler using the imagination to pretend to be something, somewhere else. The poem dresses us up. I wonder: what happens when we undress? Is this the poetics? Penguins, of course, are simultaneously “dressed up” in their tuxedo-like skins and naked all at once! In this sense I too want to be a penguin poet.

Reilly: Just thought I’d throw out these lines from part two of “Hearing” by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge as an example of qualities that can arise from introducing a scientific mental landscape into a poem apparently about other things. I also think it has some interesting parallels with both Rae’s and Gilbert’s poems.

A bird falls out of the air, through the anti-weave, into the anti-net, delineating anti-immanence.

Twenty-four crows upstate, each fall is a gestural syllable.

Cover them with a blue cloth of creatures ready to be born, contact like starlight that will arrive, for sure.

That’s how a girl away is undivided, like virtuous deeds accomplished quietly.

She is the other of myself hearing, simultaneous.

A flashing sequin in the unapplied form of universal, co-presence before space, internal line of time into hearing not arriving from meanings of words, like starlight.

She spans real time over this sense of being touched, like a beautiful dress.

I see the movement here as from what could be construed as the antiscientific (line 1: “delineating anti-immanence”) to the purely linguistic (line 2: crows fall out of animal-hood to become figures of visualized language) to the scientific (line 3: creatures ready to be born are like the light of stars that will arrive eventually through the continuum of space/time). So far, pretty familiar stuff, including the use of science to construct a slightly unusual simile. Much more interesting to me is that after these (perhaps false?) starts, the poem becomes a meditation on the nature of human “co-presence,” in which the struggles of communication are presented within the language of physics, specifically as an intersection of energy (light and sound) with matter (we humans). On one hand this is a sophisticated exploration of concepts of “self” and “other.” On the other it’s a hilarious riff on parent/child hearing and not-hearing. That it works on both levels is what is so pleasurable. Another thing I like is the way humans are presented in this poem as just one among other species. Human mothers in fact are even conflated with plants (the part of the living world without “locomotion”)! Other works by Berssenbrugge such as “Endocrinology” and “Pollen” are equally interesting in this regard, but are infiltrated primarily by medical science and terminology. In fact, one route into the scientific for writers seems to be the experience of serious illness. You see this in Will Alexander’s work as well.

Armantrout (to Amy): One thing I like about your poem is that it brings back and lets us see/feel the strangeness and displacement inherent in the scientific language and concepts you’re using. Scientific writing itself, by convention, represses personal experience. One use of poetry is to bring the “objective” and the “subjective” back together until they’re indistinguishable.

Harvey:

Harvey: The idea of ‘emergence’ has been kept in mind but not specifically stated in the following piece. Hopefully, some aspects of ‘emergence’ will be noticed in the form as well as the subject matter of the poem.

Here is E. O. Wilson: “To add one last concept from computer science, social insect workers are cellular automata, defined as agents programmed to function interactively as a higher level system.” From “The Superorganism.”

Elaine Scarry has written in The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World: “To have a material form is to have a self-substantiating form; to lack a material form is to lack the autonomous power of self-substantiation.”

The ‘actual’ car in Apollinaire’s “The Little Car” poem, or that part of the text, is material enough in its shape that it can ‘vocalize’ other material, and not merely advertise itself, to the outside of itself. In the poem, the three people inside the car say what’s on their minds, although they are said to be silent, through the very structure of the car and themselves, which are one. It is difficult to differentiate the car from those inside it.

Going back a bit: with the adding of the vertical dimension to the already horizontal (preceding) text it becomes possible to make an image by moving the letters around on the flat surface of the paper: here, a two dimensional image representing a three dimensional object — the car. The car’s image design, however, is abstract in form.

Herbert Read in “Form in Modern Poetry” gives the following two definitions:

“Organic form”: When a work of art has its own inherent laws, originating with its very invention and fusing in one vital unity both structure and content, then the resulting form may be described as “organic.”

“Abstract form”: When an organic form is stabilised and repeated as a pattern, and the intention of the artist is no longer related to inherent dynamism of an inventive act, but seeks to adapt content to predetermined structure then the resulting form may be described as “abstract.”

When the car part in the poem is read keeping an eye on both the shape of the car and what the words that make up the car are saying, which are different to just saying that it is a car, the form appears to become more ‘organic.’ It seems that an extra dimension has been added. Here John Cayley’s point on bringing in the dimension of time is important. The enacting of this part of the poem provides another dimension, not as clear cut as time, that brings the car momentarily to the reader, while reading it, out of the ‘abstract’ and into the ‘organic.’ (This of course might be true of all reading but something else is going on here as well.) The moment in time brings both the car and what it is saying together. Or both those in the car and what they are thinking.

The car seems to hover between ‘abstract’ and ‘organic’ form, and this indeterminacy and potentiality seems to imply greater self-regulation to the matter of this part of the text. Also, as will hopefully become clear, it does the same for the rest of the text, as well.

Guillaume Apollinaire, “The Little Car” in the original French and English translation.

The car is laid against the background of what has preceded it in the poem. Here, the language of war has tied everything to fluctuating metaphors of unstoppable momentum and potential, nothing is stable. The material described does not own its own time and space in which to act, everything comes together and moves forward. While in the car there are three separate people, you can see them sitting there, even though they merge with the car itself, the car is a single entity, or so it seems.

Scarry again: “Each of the two armies periodically becomes a single embodied combatant, with the real human body’s elemental duality of inflicting injury and of receiving it. The ordinary five- to six-foot vertical expanse of the adult person now becomes a colossus with, for example, one foot in Italy, another in northern Africa.”

And, Apollinaire, from near the beginning of the poem: “We said goodbye to a whole epoch / Furious giants were looming over Europe / Eagles were leaving their eyries expecting the sun …” and a little later, “As I went I carried within me all the armies that were fighting.”

The metaphors of war reflect on those inside the car heightened senses but also a greater fragility because temporarily separated from the whole, which is accentuated by the text’s greater materiality or ‘organic’ form in this section. And also, as said all along, it is difficult to differentiate the car from those inside it: at the same time as the car is a part of the mechanization of the culture that is going to war, and transports them to the war, the changing of the car’s tires and the bringing in the idea of blacksmiths make it more of a personal extension of the human — the acts would be performed using hand tools.

There is this doubleness to the poem: the car reflects back onto the rest of the text the actual fact of being human in these circumstances. And the transition from the straight text to the car starts with a curved line, not yet fully part of the car and no longer fully part of the preceding text, and the same happens in reverse after the car. The car momentarily comes out of and then goes back into the militancy of the rest of the text: “We understood my comrade and I / That the little car had brought us into a new / Era,” from near the end of the poem.

Turning the page around 90 degrees and the car looks like the torso of a pregnant woman.

PS I can send in a photocopy of the full poem.

Adair:

The attractor was stable, low-dimensional, and nonperiodic. It could never intersect itself, because if it did, returning to a point already visited, from then on the motion would repeat itself in a periodic loop. That never happened — that was the beauty of the attractor. Those loops and spirals were infinitely deep, never quite joining, never intersecting. Yet they stayed inside a finite space, confined by a box. How could that be? How could infinitely many paths lie in a finite space?

— James Gleick, Chaos (1987)

For a while I had on my desk an article pointed out to me by Laura Elrick called “The Roots of Empathy: The Shared Manifold Hypothesis and the Neural Basis of Intersubjectivity.” Just glancing at the first page, not even really reading it, made me overexcited in the same way that a poem by Emily Dickinson can. I keep meaning to read this article, but am almost afraid of its potency.

The text to which James called attention in his own 1st posting here, Eric Mottram’s investigation of concrete poetry in Towards Design in Poetry (1977; recently reprinted by Veer, operating out of Birkbeck College, University of London), has among its thematics “a simultaneity of elements — visually inclined, produced in sound or some other behaviour — which are usually taken separately in poetry, or at least with a single emphasis in exegesis.” & it’s surely correct that simultaneity of apprehension has been a widespread aim in concrete poetry, & that this has often taken the form of fusing signifier & signified, often by expelling elements of linguistic reference, to produce, in Paula Claire’s words from her (still-punning) 1975 title Codesigns cited by Eric, “response to marks as sign-sounds” as a means to intimate an intimate connectivity of humans & universe (Paula would perform, e.g., the veins in leaves); the result being that concrete poetry becomes “an extra-linear writing ‘between poetry and painting.’” Nonetheless the simultaneity proposition is interesting not least because one of the big influences on modernist aesthetics given in Mottram’s text, general relativity, with its hypothesis of objects moving at different velocities in a spacetime fabric which variously adjusts these objects in conformity with the limit-speed of light, absolutely rules out absolute simultaneity. Of course, this only becomes meaningful at unimaginable velocities. Also bear in mind that this is almost all I can say about general relativity, within the confines of a highly restricted coherence (ha!) of vocabulary, derived from various pitiably beloved popularizers of science; that already when I venture into Scientific American or New Scientist, which in fact I often do, I’m operating at the limits of stretched imagination; & that I was fascinated to learn, from Allen’s “friendly polemic” [see “Basics of Defenition”] that “Nature, the ‘International Weekly Journal of Science,’ as they subtitle it in the UK, was printed on Bible paper when [he] first started reading it, it was that authoritative.” From the Nature of the 80s I remember relentlessly white-&-black matte-pulp pages of near-uniform type, tiny articles each written by many people whose 1st names were identified simply by initials, & association with the predominant greys & whites of early-60s BBC science fiction on a Cromwellian box —

Asserting the freedom of letters/words to move out of linearity renders the reference complexly 3-D. The concrete or abstract/organic image in Apollinaire’s “The Little Car,” so thoroughly discussed by James above, hovers fractally between 2- & 3-D; other of the calligrams, such as the still-life parody “Heart Crown and Mirror” or the wonderful “It’s Raining,” where words are typographically bent into clearly cartoonish images of what is being said, seem rather to collapse the 3- into the 2-D, effecting a weird redundancy. But as S. I. Lockerbie (gendered by initials) sez in his intro to Anne Hyde Greet’s 1980 translation of Calligrammes, “Tautology is impossible between a linguistic statement and the instant impression conveyed by a shape,” because a temporal slice for interpretation is inserted within the surface of the page that may further return to complicate (delay) the shape’s “instant impression” —

At this point I’m tempted to turn to Peter’s remark in his discussion of Zukofsky’s poem 12 [see “Zukofsky”], that “the crisis of the equation of materialism and realism” was made acute by the new physics, for “as long as quantum mechanics failed to provide pictures of an invisible material world, it failed to constitute a new reality.” A prefiguring & corrective of that in typography? some kind of epistemic set of transferences? Probably not, or nothing so easy —

All by way of offering a reading of James’s “Strange Attractor.” The figure is perhaps strikingly anthropomorphic, a faintly wincing native (Inuit?) holding his or her belly; on her or his left (our right) cheek, what looks like a scar; ditto, mutatis mutandis, if you turn it upside down. These visual “scars” in fact prevent any reading of the words as a continuous tracing of what, among the array of gorgeously colored figures that would briefly enthrall so many of us during the chaos theory heyday, would be called a Lorenz Attractor, initially developed to model heat convection. Nor however do they allow a pair of intertwined but self-contained spirals, disappearing each into its vortex’s vanishing point, no, there are two breaks, two barriers to resumptions that relaunch over troubles. Starting, necessarily arbitrarily, from one of these, manually revolving book or sheet, one verbal string might read:

leaving a double spiral never reaching its end three non-linear equations constructing maze the walls rearrange every time they change the three coordinates three dimensions a continuous path never overlapping falling through and rising up they move never taking/again/same path again leaving a double spiral never reaching its end three non-linear equations constructing maze the walls rearrange every time they change the three coordinates three dimensions a continuous path never overlapping

never taking same path because of the physical complications of the task of continuously focusing

Indeed, the heady citation might be taken from some edited text on chaos theory, tho’ a rather cursory google search didn’t turn it up. The idea of the infinitely bursting nut no longer does it for me, but what else might? “Where the spirals appear to join, the surfaces must divide, [Edward Lorenz] realized.” Gleick offers the following as a relatable-to model of the fractal: “Without friction a simple linear equation expresses the amount of energy you need to accelerate a hockey puck. With friction the relationship gets complicated, because the amount of energy changes depending on how fast the puck is already moving. Nonlinearity means that the act of playing the game has a way of changing the rules”; there results a “twisted changeability.” So we might think of the poem’s actual words as operating a kind of coiling friction in our apprehending the apparent simple duplication/spectacle of a Lorenz figure. Or to put it another way, an intuitively dubious Nietzscheanism, the ability of willing negation to turn negation to affirmation — here we get a look at it in those scars or slivers that repeatedly interrupt continuity as they do disappearance, crafting infinity on a 2-D surface even as they detach the poem from purely visual spectacle.

Darragh: Hi, all —

On a day off, jumping in here.

The “don’t write of what you don’t know” critique works to reinforce the worst aspects of C. P. Snow’s Two Cultures commentary. This discussion prompted me to reread it today, and I’d forgotten that Snow paints the scientific community as a culture where differences in class have been erased by education, producing a productive, future-oriented moral enterprise concerned with global poverty. Literary types, on the other hand, are amoral, self-absorbed whiners who helped pave the way for the Holocaust. When we literary types take on science, we help break open that dualism so that the capitalism in scientific endeavors can hang out in all its “we-don’t-need-regulation-’cause-we-have-your-best-interests-at-heart — love-those-boundless-profits” glory. Do you think BP will change its name to CP?!! We are citizen poets when we refuse to be in awe of/challenge the idea of a “pure science” providing the authority for what is good.

Adair: Hi Tina —

Intriguingly, this is the first time that someone has so overtly brot up the science/capitalism connections — certain positions or attitudes are beginning to take shape: the informed putting of science to metaphorical use for the exploration of everyday life (Rae); an excitement with the vocab (Evelyn), the sense of an “aesthetic effect” distinct to science which scientists are in various ways constrained to disavow (John Cayley, and related, Marcella) — certainly science popularizers are allowed to show enthusiasm, & major scientists are generally supposed to be passionate … the placing of poetry at the service of the exploration of scientific developments (Amy) … now critical (yourself) —

The one witty thing I’m aware of Henry Kissinger ever having said is that “No one will ever win the battle of the sexes — there’s too much fraternizing with the enemy.” It’s not directly analogous, but there are many fascinating, beautiful, precisioned, & cool things about science, even when it’s in the service of the enemy — perhaps more urgently, much we believe accurate that we know about the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe comes from people with scientific training — ditto for large-scale climate change, the circulation of the blood, & so on — those who deny climate change we tend to regard as either scientific illiterates or paid scoundrels; they in their turn have no problem rejecting an overwhelming weight of scientific authority, any more than do creationists —

The various prestiges of various authorities are a key thematic here —

Reilly: Hello all,

One of the interesting results of following this online dialog for me has been the realization that I bring science into my poetry less directly, or maybe it’s just less “head-on,” than others. I’m not so concerned with accuracy or even with addressing, or enacting, or referring to scientific ideas per se, but am very interested in constructing a language environment that blends the “presence” of science with the ethical and emotional implications of living among its “findings” and “impacts.” While I admire poetry that aims to achieve what Joan calls the enactment of “the dynamic principles that a scientific model has been developed to understand,” I’m more engaged, at least at the moment, in exploring the poethics of a world that, as technological animals, we both create and inhabit (and one of our chief technologies being language).

Recently I’ve been working on a long poem called “The Dreamlife of Materials” and I’ve posted a few sections to the site. This work integrates a faux architectural language I found in a book called Siteless: 1001 Building Forms, by the French architect François Blanciak, into a series of imaginary reports and letters written by an engineer who’s been assigned to a jobsite in some kind of futuristic dystopian landscape. As I worked on this I was surprised to find that the creation of a pseudotechnical poetic language opened a space for a tone of “contained hysteria” which I probably couldn’t have managed otherwise. It was this mixture of the technical with the hyperemotional that interested me, because I think the contemporary moment is marked by a very shaky faith in our ability to solve problems through technological prowess and enormous, almost inexpressible, grief over our environmental circumstances.

from The Dreamlife of Materials

Time stamp: 029 ZMT 77104Report from build site: 423

It is windy terrible and the time frame comfort slotso doted overkeeps hurtling

today: 12 chapped columns, 3 quartered globes, 244 knuckled sheets

and the scalped dome project “lays wavers”

Astonishingly, the corner tear is back-lit in dream lightand this night after night

Still we keep pouring digital spit into this blog storage devicehaving unboxed the urbox permanently

yours, sincerely

Time stamp: 029 ZMT 7710118Report from build site: 37B

Ms. T,

It was a shock that you would sendthis ignition system

instead of the slogan-infestation compresswe had so explicitly requested

What exactly was your intent?Nonetheless we animated the chamberand discovered the delicate filigreeof the disaster end

It is undeniable that our little mitosis acton this latticewas over-hatched

but we keep erecting frames no matter howthe times expose our litter failings

No scale, order or end to this series

which I’ve come to think of as just so much panel gushheld in place by the flimsiest identity replacement gear

— one in a heap of trembling outcomes

filed under say “universal envelop mistake blanket”

Adair: Hi Evelyn —

This seems to me tone-perfect satire of a multifaceted colonizing effort: its internal paranoias (“What exactly was your intent?”), its ominous preparations for “slogan infestation,” among them the rush of exclamation marks leading to the plea “Excuse my effervescence!” (reminiscent of the advertising strategy in which actors mime in overabundance the enthusiasm we are required/permitted to express for the commodity being pushed), the hint of institutionalizing machines for environmental harm (“barbarism star,” etc) —

I wonder how you wld see these pieces as relating (or not) to stances on science fiction staked out by Joanna Russ in her 1973 essay “Toward an Aesthetics of Science Fiction,” where she insists that barring one or two necessarily acceptable violations such as faster-than-light space travel, the premises of an SF text shld not contravene “what is known to be [scientifically] known”; and the greater latitude extended by her colleague Samuel R. Delany shortly after, when he proposed that SF cld find its launching-pad in “real, speculative, or pseudo-science” — the last of these not, of course, any more than in Russ, ruling out an intersecting basis in a take on social shiftings —

We seem to know pretty much what the “hurtling” of “the time frame comfort slot” must imply — we may not be able to guess what “knuckled sheets” are but defer to the routine assuredness of the reference — “What exactly was your intent?” is LOL-funny because the ramifications of the preceding choice are so absolutely opaque —

I think in the first Die Hard movie (1988) I began to see technical operations (usually in heist contexts) conducted in a paratactic blur of fast-forwards, as poets had launched into long before, making contact with a larger world of processes/machinic intimacies which we cld rarely explain ourselves but knew/assumed had an explanation — & if an explanation, perhaps a purpose — the issue of trust resumed its career as narrative & readerly thematics [“NO TRUST” sez Melville 1857, & the Tea Party echoes today, except that Melville meant it] — the issue of trust engages the issue of discipline, but at the same time an issue of somehow-slanted landscape —

I think it could be of interest to the discussion. He begins with C. P. Snow’s 2 cultures and goes on to give a history of the Luddites. But he also notes the inseparable praxis of literature and technology (and thus science and poetry).

best wishes,

Allen

Reilly: Allen, Gilbert et al.,

I got great pleasure out of the Pynchon essay and it gave me some ideas as well as to how to respond to Gilbert’s questions about “The Dreamlife of Materials” and the whole issue of “sci-fi.” (And I’d also like to take the occasion to thank Gilbert for being the maestro of this e-dialog.) As for Pynchon’s identification of science fiction as a site for a contemporary Luddite sensibility (or at least, contemporary as he saw it in 1984), I agree that the genre often serves as an outlet for paranoia and fear of the next chapter of our technologically-driven future. Of course all human history has been “technologically-driven,” but the rate of change does keep accelerating. I’m not in any way against such change, but certainly think we live equally among the results of technology as destroyer (weapons technology, environmental degradation) as those of technology as emancipator (public health, digital communications). I’ve never been a reader of science fiction, so can’t really comment on the state of the art, but do find it very satisfying as a TV genre. In fact, I gave a talk at the CUNY/Belladonna conference last fall called “Vulcan Feminist Poetics: Scientific Appropriation and the Mask of Spock” that posed questions about poets, including myself, who don “the mask of Spock” (or, alternatively, the “drag of lab”) in its various guises as both aesthetic and social strategy. This talk focused on questions such as: In what ways is such a strategy an embrace of the world, a tool of investigation, even an exploration of gendered life? In what ways is it a flight or reprieve from gender, a way of masking out issues of class, race, sexual orientation? But one of the other questions I put forth, and perhaps this is what accounts for the nature of the poetic landscape of “Dreamlife of Materials,” was: Is the Vulcanist’s quest to go where no one has gone before (the goal of the masters of the universe and the premise of Star Trek)? Or is it a search for home (the goal of exiles and the premise of Battlestar Galactica, in which a small group of survivors of nuclear holocaust are just trying to make it from one devastated home to the next)? In a sidebar email to James Harvey, I mentioned that it may be my years spent in research labs — I was a technician in the lab of Martin Chalfie at Columbia, who eventually went on to win the Nobel Prize in 2008 — that has moved my interest from the strictly scientific to what Gilbert called, regarding Delany’s fiction, “the social shiftings.” Not because of any disillusionment with the scientific, which I got to experience at its best and most idealistic, but maybe “having done that,” I felt liberated, when it came to poetry, from issues of accuracy etc., and was looking for very different things, like the ability to be playful and extreme and let language take the lead. But that’s not the whole of it. I think that the freedom of poetry (which I don’t want to overstate, we are of course all inhabiting the same only semi-autonomous zone of language) does provide an arena (as does the pseudoscience of sci fi) to explore, with no (or fewer) holds barred, many aspects of our current situation. And maybe that’s been part of the two streams of this online dialog: those whose work embodies the exuberance of recent scientific thinking and those whose work is colored by the social shiftings of a world marked by apparent impending catastrophe. Two aspects of the same thing?

Adair: Evelyn —

This is very interesting, that an inside experience of a top-flight research lab liberates you from the complex anxieties re the scientifically accurate that may haunt those of us without that experience — can anyone else speak to this?

I’m also very glad that Pynchon has been brot into this forum, & his article from a key date, I think, 1984. When in the late 70s I first became aware of Allen’s work & its ability to present the complexities & thicknesses of what was becoming apparent as an increasingly technologized culture, I was working on what became a PhD dissertation on post-1945 American epic fiction, featuring Pynchon & Delany among others. In Gravity’s Rainbow, his most recent novel then published, Pynchon was working with an internalization of Henry Adams’s hailing of entropy as perhaps “the great generalization that would bring all history under a law” (GR enacts this down to the level of the sentence) & also the ideas of radical neo-Freudians Norman O. Brown & Wilhelm Reich; thus he has one of his spokesmen in the novel refer to the worldwide “persistence … of structures favoring death. Death converted into more death …. This is the sign of Death the impersonator.” It extends into a reading of science/technology so “Luddite” that it includes a tirade on refrigerators for arresting the organic process of decay. I take it we all know that a McDonalds hamburger, left on a kitchen table for 2 weeks, will suffer no such organic process …. But I remember also the disquiet many of us felt with Ginsberg’s “Plutonian Ode” (1980) & its major vexation that before us was a “new element … unborn in nature … named for Death’s planet through the sea beyond Uranus” —

OK, this is coming out of a familiar tradition in American lit. By 1984, Pynchon had been for some time at work on his next biggie, Mason & Dixon, eventually published in 1997, where he’s trying to get away from the paranoid obsession with thanatological closed systems via, as Joe Tabbi argues in Cognitive Fictions (2002), the notion of autopoesis, “an explosive transformation ‘across some Threshold of self-Intricacy’ unpredictable from the mechanical principles of the … original assembly.” ‘Self-organization’ — ‘order out of chaos’ — buzz-terms in the National University of Singapore, where I spent much of the 90s, & where Ilya Prigogine was a welcome invited lecturer. ‘Emergence,’ one of the terms that James has valuably raised — something that may cut across the organic, the technological, & the poetic — any more on that? (Tabbi: “the self-creating process out of unknown cognitive elements” — including those of the mind itself) —

Back to 1984, around the incipience of the hot new SF genre of cyberpunk — so hot that Fredric Jameson intemperately thot it might be the literary genre of the postmodern era. 1986 saw the Mirrorshades anthology where editor Bruce Sterling drew attention to a new kind of technology — electronic, often miniaturized — where “on” buttons didn’t metallically snap on but crept into light with soft whispers, that were stroked rather than stabbed, that dwelt in an ambience of early-morning bluegreys. I’m suggesting that that was around the point when it became hard to be alienated from science & technology in the way that the Ginsberg of “Plutonian Ode” & the Pynchon of GR had been; tho’ we could contrast Ginsberg’s deadly seriousness here with what makes the writing of “Is It OK to Be a Luddite” characteristically delightful: the relaying of esoteric (here mostly historical) learning thro’ a battery of pop-culture filters (“Sorry, Rev, got some knitting.” “What, again?”). Was it also about then that the word “cool” was reincarnated from its 50s jazz ambience & 60s cultural savviness to imply something to do with smart & elegant technology? — tho’ its applications radiated after that (applications rather than meaning) —

Speaking for myself, without a scientific education beyond the age of 14, I found the Pynchon of GR to go in very deep, to be operating still as an unconscious tug. Useful to me then is Allen’s urging [in “Basics of Definition”] to pluralize & differentially frame the sciences (as well, obviously, as to integrate them in other kinds of temporary syntheses, which I suppose is one name for poems). Physics is very cool not least, perhaps, for poets, because whether at macro- or micro-levels it abounds with creative intellects & giant ideas we can admire, which ideas can provide wonderfully subtle metaphors without themselves being enmired. The dirt on Schrödinger, please —

Adair: PS I just read “The Trade in Bathos,” an article by Keston Sutherland in Jacket 15, December 2001, but written when the 2000 US presidential election was still undecided, which includes the following:

The position from which we can observe, describe, criticize, hate, ignore, or admire globalization is a position of literal ecstatic compromise. We stand outside of what we see; we are excluded fundamentally from the knowledge which, however, we are free to believe that we possess; we are totally compromised in that exclusion, not only by our literal inability to influence or properly to comprehend the sovereignty of liberal economics, but for a more profound reason. This reason is to do with what we mean by (and what we can do with) the word “ideas.”

The argument is complex, taking off from the disquiet felt by Pope and Locke at the freedom (license?) people had come to feel in choosing to believe wrong or fanciful things, in the context of the “first great wave of financial speculation following the establishment of the Bank of England, the National Debt and the introduction of paper currency in the 1690s”; Keston now sees variants on bathos as near-universal among practitioners of innovative poetry, himself included; not long after that he began to promote & practice what he called “vague” poetry, an interesting idea to me at least. But. Almost from the moment I moved to NYC in 1999, it was apparent to me that the 60s maxim “If it feels good, do it” had been widely replaced by “If it feels good, think it — & by all means proclaim it.” This seems different from the deliberate playing with wrong or fanciful ideas by poets, not least because so many people so passionately reject views that among relevant scientists are all but the consensus (notably re climate change and neo-Darwinian evolution). A mass bid — Luddite in the worst sense — to withdraw from the contemporary world is uncomfortable to see up close; the political, environmental, & educational effects are direct; the kooky pronouncements from many Tea Party candidates for the midterm elections are perhaps symptomatic of something hard even to begin to analyze.

In the meantime, this is Tabbi’s comment in Cognitive Fictions with respect to truth-value in Mason & Dixon:

That Dixon recognizes his map as “an overhead view of a World that never was” does not, in itself, contradict its truth value or scientific integrity. His map is true in the way that a circle, line, or triangle is “true,” even though none of these actually exists in the world: what Dixon has encountered … is the efficacy of approaching the empirical world of “truth-like detail” with the aid of a cognitive theory. Above all, the integrity of the composition, its self-consistency rather than consistency with the outside world, makes the map truth-like.

An interview with Craig Dworkin

Craig Dworkin at the In(ter)ventions gathering at Banff in February 2010. Photo by Andi Olsen.

Craig Dworkin is a poet, critic, editor, and professor at the University of Utah. He is the author of five books of poetry, including Motes (2011), The Perverse Library (2010), Parse (2008), Strand (2004), and Dure (2004). He has edited five volumes, including Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (2011)with Kenneth Goldsmith, The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound (2009) with Marjorie Perloff, and The Consequence of Innovation: 21st Century Poetics (2008); he is also the author of a critical study, Reading the Illegible (2003), and has published articles in such diverse journals as October, Grey Room, Contemporary Literature, and College English. He runs Eclipse, an online archive of radical small-press writing from the last quarter century. This interview was conducted over email throughout the summer and fall of 2011.

Katie L. Price: The recently published anthology that you edited with Kenneth Goldsmith, Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing, was a sort of expansion of the UbuWeb “Anthology of Conceptual Writing” correct? What prompted the original online anthology and when and why did you decide to expand the project into a book?

Craig Dworkin: The online anthology (which — let’s be honest — is really more like an illustrated essay than a true anthology, despite the grandiose title) came from working in different disciplines. I was teaching in an English department, DJ-ing an avant-garde music show on the radio, and writing art history articles …. and I realized that these subcultures didn’t speak much to one another. So someone interested in a particular musical composition, say, had probably never heard of the literary work that was fundamentally — conceptually — very much like it. Indeed, I came to realize that a poem might well have more in common with a piece of music than with any other poem. So in part I wanted the UbuWeb site to make a case for reading across disciplines.

At the same time, through my research I was discovering lots of interesting text-works from the ’60s, the moment of Conceptual Art (this was before the several, big, really useful anthologies and studies of the topic had come out), and I felt like there was a particular case to be made for a practice that was undeniably “writing,” but without the communicative, exophoric, expressive goals generally associated with writing.

Now the print anthology, Against Expression, picks up on the idea of writing that is not expressive in the conventional sense; it collects texts that are not the result of unique, coherent, expressive subjects putting things “in their own words.” But it’s actually making a case that is exactly the opposite of the online anthology. Instead of being interdisciplinary, it argues for the importance of local social contexts, and it focuses on works that were published as literature. So it doesn’t include “outsider” writing, for instance (the symptomatic writing of the mentally ill); nor obsessive vernacular practices; or texts that were produced for a gallery audience rather than a book-reading audience, and so forth. Even when those texts look indistinguishable from the work that is included.

Price: You’ve said that the arguments behind the illustrated essay, to use your term, and the print anthology are opposite. I’m wondering if this decision reflects not only your evolving research interests, but also a change in fields. For example, would you say that more scholars, writers and artists are reading across disciplines now and this makes the argument of the illustrated essay less immediately pertinent? Or that the anthology is partially a response to how conceptual writing has been recently received? In other words, how might you situate the two projects themselves historically and socially, especially when, as you say, the texts in them might appear indistinguishable?

Dworkin: I don’t think there’s been any sudden sea-change. Disciplines have a strong gravitational pull. Though at a very small scale — on the level of specific individuals — I can certainly think of people in the art world who are now looking more to literature, and vice versa. Michalis Pichler, in Germany, for instance, or the Information As Material collective in England, or the kind of scene that has been developing in Los Angeles, say. Andrea Andersson is curating a museum show of conceptual texts at the intersection of the gallery and the page. And it’s not coincidental that the US launch of the anthology was at MoMA, and the UK launch will be at the Whitechapel Gallery.

However, a couple of longer-term historical shifts are legible in the discourse around poetics. The first has to do with appropriation. In the 1970s, poets were constructing poems from entirely appropriated material: Charles Bernstein’s “Asylum”; Lyn Hejinian’s Gesualdo and Writing Is an Aid to Memory; most of Clark Coolidge’s Ing, and so on. But appropriation and procedure are rarely mentioned back then. The poets themselves either don’t say anything at all, or they don’t make a big deal about it if asked. Reviews and critical articles might say that a work “sounds like” it is citational, or that it’s “tempting to speculate” on their sources, but that’s it. Whereas today, the fact of appropriating a source is the first thing a poet will say about their work; it’s how poems are introduced at readings and how books are advertised. Back in the 1990s, Lyn Hejinian was reluctant to admit that were any sources at all in Writing Is an Aid to Memory, but she now recounts the procedure as a matter-of-course. [1] So something fundamental has shifted over that last decade or so.

The other big change has to do with the rhetoric around readability. “Opacity” and “illegibility” were key terms in the language of value for avant-garde poetry in the ’70s and ’80s, when the recalcitrance of a text was aligned with other forms of political resistance. The most exciting poetry was often agrammatical or asemantic, and appropriated fragments were collaged in ways that heightened disjunction. Today, that’s no longer the case. It’s not that the poetry today is any easier, or more complacent or complicit, but the areas of interest and attention have shifted. And this is always one of the difficulties for readers when poetics shift: we too often expect the work that follows an earlier avant-garde to continue to look like that older mode, when in fact influence and imitation are very different things.

Price: I had never really thought about poetry introductions being such vital pieces of the puzzle of literary history, but it makes perfect sense, so thank you for that. But I’d like to ask you two questions.

You characterize avant-garde poetry of the ’70s and ’80s as agrammatical, asemantic, and disjunctive. This seems to be the standard and accepted reading of the avant-garde of that time. For example, I’m reminded of Juliana Spahr’s The Transformation, in which she repeats the phrase “fragmentation, quotation, disruption, disjunction, agrammatical syntax and so on” almost to the point of absurdity. I wonder if you had to characterize the values or characteristics of the 1990s and 2000s what you might say? In your mind, are the key terms mostly the same but just used or understood differently? Or are the characteristics of more contemporary poetry different entirely?

Which leads to my second question: How do you see your own work, both with the anthology and works such as The Perverse Library or Parse, addressing these questions?

Dworkin: Well, this is all from a very distant, generalizing perspective; I should be quick to note that there is certainly astonishingly good work being published today that doesn't fit either description (Joseph Massey, for just one example, is one of my favorite poets). And Peter Inman, for a very different example, is publishing exciting, masterful new books that make good on the rhetoric of the ’70s avant-garde in ways that the actual poems from the period seldom did: “agrammatical, asemantic, and disjointed” in the extreme. But in general, from a certain remove, I do think we’ve seen the basic characteristics change.

Which is precisely why I wanted to publish the anthology. The number of texts manifesting those new characteristics had reached a critical mass. When Kenny and I first started talking about the anthology, we had a handful of examples in mind and figured we’d find a few more; by the time it was in production at Northwestern, new books of what we would consider “conceptual” writing were being published weekly, any of which could have been centerpieces in the anthology.

As a scholar, I’m interested in moments like that, when the literary landscape changes dramatically, and I wanted to document that moment in the first years of the twenty-first century when modes of “conceptual writing” were newly relevant to such a rapidly growing number of writers. As the anthology is at pains to demonstrate, these modes were not unprecedented, but they were operating with a newly visible significance for many writers. None of which, I should add, makes Conceptual writing somehow “better” than what came before — I don’t subscribe to a progress model of literary history — and none of which suggests that people ought to write in this way (I’m always surprised by the panicked fear Conceptual writing can elicit from other poets, as if they’re going to have to abandon their writing and be forced to transcribe newspapers for the rest of their careers …).

As to my own poetry, Parse is actually a good example of how the coalescing of similar writing in the 2000s changes the light in which we see such works. At the time I started the book, in the mid-1990s, there was no such thing as “conceptual writing.” I was primarily interested in postwar art (something like Mel Ramsden’s series of “100% Abstract” paintings were a direct inspiration, but also Robert Smithson, John Cage, minimalism, et cetera), renegade surrealism (Bataille and the Documents group; René Daumal and Le Grand Jeu group; late Dada works; et cetera), and a scattershot of other modernisms: OuLiPo; Russian Futurism; Gertrude Stein; Mina Loy … And although I was reading a lot of poetry in the Language tradition, the relation of that poetry to Parse was indirect; it granted the necessary permission to write abstract, non-communicative works, but nothing they were doing looked anything like a parsed grammar book. Similarly, I was profoundly inspired by Darren Wershler and Christian Bök, who were important friends and role models for me, but works like The Tapeworm Foundry and Eunoia were still years off. I knew about No. 111 from teaching art history, but I wouldn’t meet Kenny and find out about Soliloquy and his new writing projects until 1998. A dozen years later, against the background of the anthology and all those other books, Parse suddenly makes much more sense, and it seems to take part in a conversation that it wasn’t really able to have back in the ’90s.

Price: As you say, the conversation has changed surrounding books that use what we might call “conceptual practices,” although exactly what that means, I think, is still up for debate. I’ve noticed this change even in just the last four years — four years ago I often found myself having to justify my interest in “conceptual writing,” and even, at times, its precedents. Now it seems, even if “conceptual writing” still elicits anxiety, tension, or downright anger from both poets and critics, the mere proliferation of these techniques has rendered a conversation about these texts, and conceptual practices or techniques, necessary.

Would you mind talking a bit more about how the writing of your colleagues influences the projects you undertake and how you understand your own work? You mentioned that Kenneth Goldsmith and Darren Wershler were particularly influential. What types of conversations do you have with each other? And do these directly influence the projects you undertake and the way in which you undertake them?

Dworkin: I can certainly name a few of the ways that conversations with Christian Bök and Darren Wershler initially — and then for many years with Kenny Goldsmith — and then more recently with Brian Kim Stefans and Rob Fitterman as well, have had a direct influence on my writing projects. Most importantly, they’ve always provided the right combination of permission and provocation: contemporary models of going all the way (I always think of Blaise Cendrars’s line from La Prose du Transsibérien: “j’étais fort mauvais poète. Je ne savais pas aller jusqu’au bout”) and then the challenge to go even farther. Plus, we’re good enough friends to give bluntly honest assessments, and to trust each other’s judgments in turn: we’ve all had books we thought were completed and polished and ready for press …. until one of the others challenged us to push the project to another level. I don’t think I’m giving anything away to say, for instance, that Christian completely reconceived and rewrote Eunoia, ratcheting up the content to match the formal bravura of a first version, after sharing it with a few of us. In the end, these are the readers I’m writing for. And because the projects are in dialogue with one another, those projects in many ways are the conversation.

Now, I’m not sure any of that is any different from what all writers experience; but as you might expect, the nature of those conversations is not at the level of local craft concerns — tweaking particular lines of discrete poems, say — but rather at the broad level of testing and proving the conceptual parameters. The most practical questions tend to be about paratexts (how much explanatory apparatus should accompany a work?), or the fit of form to content — but mainly it is a conversation, at all levels, about how to realize the full force and rigor and elegance an unexpected intellectual investigation might achieve.

Price: The last thing you said reminds me of a line from your introductory essay to the UbuWeb “Anthology of Conceptual Writing,” that the test of this poetry is “no longer whether it could have been done better (the question of the workshop), but whether it could conceivably have been done otherwise.” I’m interested in this notion that if a work is “done otherwise,” it is actually a completely different work and how this relates to the scientific vocabulary you used in describing your interactions with certain colleagues: “testing and proving,” “explanatory apparatus,” “intellectual investigation.” The model here seems to be that of a laboratory of literature: writers and thinkers working side by side to discover the unexpected. At least that’s one of the things I find most interesting about conceptual literature, and particularly your work.

Would you mind talking a bit about how you and your colleague’s work relates to science — and perhaps even if this characteristic of “intellectual investigation” at all influenced the decisions to include or exclude certain works in Against Expression?

Dworkin: Marjorie Perloff has said “I don’t especially care for the word ‘experimental,’ which implies that the poetry in question is just an experiment, that it may well fail,” [2] but I like the word for precisely that reason: the suggestion that poetry can tell us something we didn’t know before — not because it communicates some wisdom or knowledge or insight from the author, but because its structures — the process of its composition and the specifics of its final form — reveal something in and of themselves. This is also where the idea of the experimental links up to the conceptual: neither is primarily about expressing or communicating. Rather, they are primarily about framing and asking and recording.

There is also a sense in which the experimental frees the audience as well, since the poem, in some sense, is written not so that it caters to the reader, but so that it serves Poetry — an experimental poem is written for language. What happens if you alphabetize five-syllable phrases ending in an “r”sound? What happens if you restrict yourself to only one vowel? What patterns emerge from a parsed text? How many chemicals make up a printed page? We learn more, with such works, about language itself than we do about their authors.

But to answer your question more directly: the closest relation to science would surely be found in Christian Bök’s Xenotext Experiment. There, Christian has taught himself an extraordinary amount of genetics and biochemistry, is working directly in the lab with credentialed scientists, and has published the work in science journals more than in poetry journals. And in that work you can catch a glimpse of the crossroads Conceptual Writing is going to come to: whether to turn its back on conventional poetry (Christian is speaking more to non-poets with that project than to other writers) or to challenge the comfortable status quo directly (as Vanessa Place is doing).